Debian Project News - September 9th, 2020

Welcome to this year's first issue of DPN, the newsletter for the Debian community. Topics covered in this issue include:

Welcome to the Debian Project News!

We hope that you enjoy this Special Archival Edition of the Debian Project News which repeats, introduces, and attempts to catch you up on most of the year's news for 2020 so far.

For this special edition of the news, we have omitted a few regular sections in our effort to bring our coverage up to date. Should you wish to find older or missing information, please review our Bits from Debian Blog or our Debian Micronews Service where all recent and current news items have already been shared through this calendar year.

Official communication channels for Debian.

From time to time we get questions about current events, the rules about who may own websites in the Debian namespace, the progress of development within the community, or inquiries as to the official channels of communication for and from Debian.

The News section of the Debian website carries formal information and announcements many of which are mirrored/shared from the debian-news and debian-announce mailing lists.

Our Bits from Debian Blog carries news from multiple Debian mailing-lists along with semi-formal information and announcements on a much faster news release cycle.

Our Micronews Service carries and covers short, immediate impact, or breaking and current news event items. The Micronews service also feeds to multiple social media feeds, such as twitter, identi.ca, and framapiaf.org.

Of course, we cannot forget the medium you are reading: the Debian Project News is the project newsletter, which comes out somewhat randomly (help needed - see below).

Please note that all of the listed channels for communication are available via the https:// protocol which you will see in use throughout our website and all official channels.

Should you need to reach out to us for questions around an announcement or news item, please do not hesitate to contact us via email at press@debian.org. We would ask you to please note that the press and publicity teams which provide these information-only services are not able to provide direct user support; such inquiries should be forwarded to the debian-user mailing lists or toward the appropriate Debian Team.

The Publicity team call for volunteers and help!

Your Publicity team is asking for help from you our readers, developers, and interested parties to contribute to the Debian news effort. We implore you to submit items that may be of interest to our community and also ask for your assistance with translations of the news into (your!) other languages along with the needed second or third set of eyes to assist in editing our work before publishing. If you can share a small amount of your time to aid our team which strives to keep all of us informed, we need you. Please reach out to us via IRC on #debian-publicity on OFTC.net, or our public mailing list, or via email at press@debian.org for sensitive or private inquiries.

We have elected a new DPL.

Jonathan Carter (highvoltage), the newly elected DPL, shares his thoughts, thanks, and outlines for the future of Debian in his first official blog post as DPL. New DPL blog posts are also posted on the official Debian blog.

Security Advisories

Debian's Security Team releases current advisories on a daily basis (Security Advisories 2020). Please read them carefully and subscribe to the security mailing list.

The Debian website now also archives the security advisories issued by the Debian Long Term Support team and posted to the debian-lts-announce mailing list.

Internal News

News for Debian 10 buster: 10.5 released

In July 2019, we welcomed the release of Debian 10 (codename buster). Since then, the Debian project announced the first, second, third, fourth, and fifth point release updates of its stable distribution. Debian 10.5 was published on 1 August 2020.

Updated Debian 9: 9.13 released

The Debian project announced the tenth, eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth point (and final) release updates of its old stable distribution Debian 9 (codename stretch). Debian 9.13 was published on 18 July 2020.

Security support for the oldstable Debian 9 release has been discontinued as of 6 July 2020. However, stretch benefits from Long Term Support (LTS) until the end of June 2022. The LTS is limited to i386, amd64, armel, armhf and arm64.

Debian 8 LTS reaching end-of-life

On 30 June 2020, Debian LTS support for Debian 8 Jessie reached its end-of-life five years after its initial release on 26 April 2015.

News on Debian 11 bullseye

Paul Gevers from the Release Team shared the upcoming policy for our next release, the tentative freeze dates, along with other updates and changes. For additional information regarding how these changes and policies came to be, please refer to an earlier Bits from the Release Team.

Aurelien Jarno proposed the removal of the mips architecture for the next release, because the porting effort has become increasingly difficult. This removal does not affect stretch or buster.

In view of Python 2's removal for the bullseye release, the debian-python team provides news about the progress and next steps of the process. More details are available on the dedicated wiki page.

The Debian Installer Bullseye Alpha 1 release was published on 5 December 2019.

Cyril Brulebois shared news on the Debian Installer Bullseye Alpha 2 release, published on 16 March 2020, which features many improvements and changes to clock-setup, grub-installer, preseed, and systemd among other enhancements. Tests and reports to find bugs and further improve the installer are welcome. Installer images and everything else are available for download.

A new localization package for the manpages

Historically, man pages for a given package have often had translations provided in various other packages using different methods, teams, and formats. Currently, most of them are no longer maintained. Most of the critical manpages were previously translated to keep the man pages up-to-date.

Debian will release a new manpages-l10n. package which will replace Perkamon, manpages-de, manpages-fr, manpages-fr-extra, manpages-pl, manpages-pl-dev, manpages-pt, and manpages-pt-dev. Additionally, this new package brings manpage translations for the Dutch and Romanian languages. The result will be that French, German, Dutch, Polish, Romanian, and Portuguese speakers will now have possibly translated manpages contained in a single package. From those translations speakers can help with or report bugs against pages. We welcome others to join this effort, but please keep in mind areas where packages are no longer maintained, those packages have a higher priority to convert into PO files and update.

DKIM Keys

Adam D. Barratt shared information on a recent enhancement to the Debian infrastructure with an enhancement for DDs to utilize DKIM keys for mail authentication.

Salsa Authentication Changes

Enrico Zini announced Salsa logins are enabled on nm.debian.org. This change improves ease of use for Applicants, Maintainers, and new Developers. Following this change, Bastian Blank from the Salsa administrators team announced a Salsa update: removal of -guest accounts towards using Salsa as an authentication provider.

Sean Whitton released Debian Policy 4.5.0.2 with updates to generated usernames, service unit script use, and update-rc.d updates.

Bits from the Technical Committee

The Technical Committee while preparing their DebConf20 talk intitled Meet the Technical Committee published their annual report and a proposal document to enhance the TC's work and processes.

New Debian Academy Team

A new initiative to define and run an official Debian e-learning platform with Debian specific courses. Do you want to help make it happen? Visit the wiki page and join the team.

External News

Debian France has renewed its board

Debian France is a non-profit organisation forming part of the Trusted Organisations. They are the main trusted organisation in Europe. They have just renewed their board. There were few changes, except the president who is now Jean-Philippe MENGUAL.

Keep in mind that this non-profit organisation has on its board only Debian developers, as President, Secretary and Treasurer. The other administrators are not all Debian Developers but contribute to Debian on booths or other events. See the news.

MiniDebConfs, MiniDebCamps, and DebConf20

MiniDebConfs and MiniDebCamps

At the start of 2020, there were seven MiniDebConfs scheduled all around the world, reflecting the vitality of our community. Organized by Debian project members, MiniDebConfs are open to everyone and provide an opportunity for developers, contributors and other interested people to meet in person. But due to the constraints related to the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic, most if not all of these conferences have been cancelled or postponed to 2021: Maceió (Brazil), Aberdeen (Scotland), Bordeaux (France), El Salvador, and Regensburg (Germany). Some have been rescheduled online: the first one, MiniDeconfOnline #1, preceded by a DebCamp, was held from 28 to 31 May 2020. The MiniDebConf Online #2 "Gaming Edition", devoted to gaming on Debian (and Linux in general) will take place from 19 to 22 November 2020 - the first two days being a Debcamp. Visit the wiki page of the event for details.

DebConf20 held Online, DebConf21 to be held in Haifa, Israel

DebConf20 has been held online for the first time, due to the coronavirus (COVID-19) disease pandemic.

The Debian community has adapted to this change with the continuing of idea sharing, Birds of a Feather (BoF) sessions and discussions and all of the things we have developed as traditions over the years. All of the sessions were streamed, with a variety of ways of participating: via IRC messaging, online collaborative text documents, and video conferencing meeting rooms.

With more than 850 attendees from 80 different countries and a total of over 100 event talks, discussion sessions, Birds of a Feather (BoF) gatherings and other activities, DebConf20 was a large success. The DebConf20 schedule included two tracks in languages other than English: the Spanish language MiniConf and the Malayalam language MiniConf.

Most of the talks and sessions are available through the Debian meetings archive website and the DebConf20 website will remain active for archival purposes and will continue to offer links to the presentations and videos of talks and events.

Next year, DebConf21 is planned to be held in Haifa, Israel, in August or September.

Debian Day

27 years strong! Happy Anniversary! Happy #DebianDay! Due to the worldwide Covid-19 pandemic, fewer local events were organised for DebianDay and some of them held online in Brazil (15 to 16 August). Nevertheless, developers and contributors had the opportunity to meet in La Paz (Bolivia), České Budějovice (Czech Republic), and Haifa (Israel) during DebConf20.

Other events

The Debian Brasil community organized from May 3rd to Jun 6th, 2020, an online event called #FiqueEmCasaUseDebian (#StayHomeUseDebian). During 27 nights, the DDs Daniel Lenharo and Paulo Santana (phls) hosted guests who shared their knowledge about Debian. You can read a report.

Reports

LTS Freexian Monthly Reports

Freexian issues monthly reports about the work of paid contributors to Debian Long Term Support.

Reproducible Builds status update

Follow the Reproducible Builds blog to get the weekly reports on their work in the buster cycle.

Help needed

Teams needing help

Debian Developers Reference is now maintained as ReStructuredText. Translations and translation updates are welcome - please see the announcement in the Misc. Developer News and the developers-reference translations thread for more information.

Call for bullseye artwork proposals

Jonathan Carter made the official call for proposals for bullseye artwork. For the most up-to-date details, please refer to the wiki. At the same time, we would like to thank Alex Makas for doing the futurePrototype theme for buster. If you would like, or know of someone who would like, to create a desktop look and feel, be sure to send in your artwork. Submission deadline is 10 October 2020.

Packages needing help:

Currently 1191 packages are orphaned and 213 packages are up for adoption: please visit the complete list of packages which need your help.

Newcomer bugs

Debian has a newcomer bug tag, used to indicate bugs which are suitable for new contributors to use as an entry point to working on specific packages. There are currently 195 bugs available tagged newcomer.

Code, coders, and contributors

New Package Maintainers since 1 July 2019

Please welcome: Marie Alexandre, Saira Hussain, laokz, Arthur Diniz, Daniel Pimentel, Ricardo Fantin da Costa, Ivan Noleto, Joao Seckler, Andre Marcelo Alvarenga, Felipe Amorim, Pedro Vaz de Mello de Medeiros, Marco Villegas, Thiago Gomes Verissimo, Teemu Toivola, Giuliano Augusto Faulin Belinassi, Miguel Figueiredo, Stephan Lachnit, Nicola Di Lieto, Ximin Luo, Paul Grosu, Thomas Ward, Ganael Laplanche, Aaron M. Ucko, Rodrigo Carvalho, Lukas Puehringer, Markus Teich, Alexander Ponyatykh, Rob Savoury, Joaquin de Andres, Georges Basile Stavracas Neto, Jian-Ding Chen (timchen119), Juan Picca, Katerina, Matthew Fernandez, Shane McDonald, Eric Desrochers, Remi Duraffort, Sakirnth Nagarasa, Ambady Anand S., Abhijith Sheheer, Helen Koike, Sven Hartge, Priyanka Saggu, Sebastian Holtermann, Jamie Bliss, David Hart, James Tocknell, Julien Schueller, Matt Hsiao, Jafar Al-Gharaibeh, Matthias Blümel, Dustin Kirkland, Gao Xiang , Alberto Leiva Popper, Benjamin Hof, Antonio Russo, Jérôme Lebleu, Ramon Fried, Evangelos Rigas, Adam Cecile, Martin Habovstiak, Lucas Kanashiro, Alessandro Grassi, Estebanb, James Price, Cyril Richard, John Scott, David Bürgin, Beowulf, Igor Petruk, Thomas Dettbarn, Vifly, Lajos Veres, Andrzej Urbaniak, Phil Wyett, Christian Barcenas, Johannes Schilling, Josh Steadmon, Sven Hesse, Gert Wollny, suman rajan, kokoye2007, Kei Okada, Jonathan Tan, David Rodriguez, David Krauser, Norbert Schlia, Pranav Ballaney, Steve Meliza, Fabian Grünbichler, Sao I Kuan, Will Thompson, Abraham Raji, Andre Moreira Magalhaes, Lorenzo Puliti, Dmitry Baryshkov, Leon Marz, Ryan Pavlik, William Desportes, Michael Elterman, Simon, Schmeisser, Fabrice Bauzac, Pierre Gruet, Mattia Biondi, Taowa Munene-Tardif, Sepi Gair, Piper McCorkle, Alois Micard, xiao sheng wen, Roman Ondráček, Abhinav Krishna C K, Konstantin Demin, Pablo Mestre Drake, Harley Swick, Robin Gustafsson, Hamid Nassiby, Étienne Mollier, Karthik, Ben Fiedler, Jair Reis, Jordi Sayol, Emily Shaffer, Fabio dos Santos Mendes, Bruno Naibert de Campos, Junior Figueredo, Marcelo Vinicius Campos Amedi, Tiago Henrique Vercosa de Lima, Deivite Huender Ribeiro Cardoso, Guilherme de Paula Xavier Segundo, Celio Roberto Pereira, Tiago Rocha, Leandro Ramos, Filipi Souza, Leonardo Santiago Sidon da Rocha, Asael da Silva Vaz, Regis Fernandes Gontijo, Carlos Henrique Lima Melara, Alex Rosch de Faria, Luis Paulo Linares, Jose Nicodemos Vitoriano de Oliveira, Marcio Demetrio Bacci, Fabio Augusto De Muzio Tobich, Natan Mourao, Wilkens Lenon, Paulo Farias, Leonardo Rodrigues Pereira, Elimar Henrique da Silva, Delci Silva Junior, Paulo Henrique Hebling Correa, Gleisson Jesuino Joaquim Cardoso, Joao Paulo Lima de Oliveira, Jesus Ali Rios, Jaitony de Sousa, Leonardo Santos, Aristo Chen, Olivier Humbert, Roberto De Oliveira, Martyn Welch, Arun Kumar Pariyar, Vasyl Gello, Antoine Latter, Ken VanDine, Francisco M Neto, Dhavan Vaidya, Raphael Medaer, Evangelos Ribeiro Tzaras, Richard Hansen, Joachim Langenbach, Jason Hedden, Boian Bonev, Kay Thriemer, Sławomir Wójcik, Lukas Märdian, Kevin Duan, zhao feng, Leandro Cunha, Cocoa, J0J0 T, Johannes Tiefenbacher, Iain Parris, Guobang Bi, Lasse Flygenring-Harrsen, Emanuel Krivoy, Qianqian Fang, Rafael Onetta Araujo, Shruti Sridhar, Alvin Chen, Brian Murray, Nick Gasson.

New Debian Maintainers

Please welcome: Hans van Kranenburg, Scarlett Moore, Nikos Tsipinakis, Joan Lledó, Baptiste Beauplat, Jianfeng Li, Denis Danilov, Joachim Falk, Thomas Perret, William Grzybowski, Lars Tangvald, Alberto Molina Coballes, Emmanuel Arias, Hsieh-Tseng Shen, Jamie Strandboge, Sven Geuer, Håvard Flaget Aasen, Marco Trevisan, Dennis Braun, Stephane Neveu, Seunghun Han, Alexander Johan Georg Kjäll, Friedrich Beckmann, Diego M. Rodriguez, Nilesh Patra, Hiroshi Yokota, Shayan Doust, Chirayu Desai, Arnaud Ferraris, Francisco Vilmar Cardoso Ruviaro, Patrick Franz, François Mazen, Kartik Kulkarni, Fritz Reichwald, Nick Black, Octavio Alvarez.

New Debian Developers

Please welcome: Keng-Yu Lin, Judit Foglszinger, Teus Benschop, Nick Morrott, Ondřej Kobližek, Clément Hermann, Gordon Ball, Louis-Philippe Véronneau, Olek Wojnar, Sven Eckelmann, Utkarsh Gupta, Robert Haist, Gard Spreemann, Jonathan Bustillos, Scott Talbert, Paride Legovini, Ana Custura, Felix Lechner, Richard Laager, Thiago Andrade Marques, Vincent Prat, Michael Robin Crusoe, Jordan Justen, Anuradha Weeraman, Bernelle Verster, Gabriel F. T. Gomes, Kurt Kremitzki, Nicolas Mora, Birger Schacht and Sudip Mukherjee.

Contributors

1375 people and 9 teams are currently listed on the Debian Contributors page for 2020.

New and noteworthy packages

A sample of the many packages added to the unstable Debian archive in the past few weeks:

Once upon a time in Debian:

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This issue of Debian Project News was edited by The Publicity Team with contributions from Laura Arjona Reina, Jean-Pierre Giraud, Paulo Henrique de Lima Santana, Jean-Philippe Mengual and Donald Norwood.