The newsletter for the Debian community
published on Mon Jan 23 00:00:00 2012 in weekly-news
Welcome to this year's second issue of DPN, the newsletter for the Debian community. Topics covered in this issue include:
Debian ahead on web servers
According to a recent W3Techs survey, Debian has just surpassed CentOS to become the most popular GNU/Linux distribution on web servers. The survey is based on the analysis of the top million web sites according to Alexa, in order to select a representative sample of established sites, and focused only on the technologies used for web sites (and not individual web pages or desktop installations). In fact, at the beginning of 2012, Debian was used by 29.4% of all Linux-based sites (and by 9.7% of all web sites), while CentOS was used by 29.1% of all Linux-based sites (and by 9.5% of all web sites). Debian "is also the fastest growing operating system at the moment: every day 54 of the top 1 million sites switch to Debian", said Matthias Gelbmann in the article. With regard to the geographical distribution of web sites using Debian, the most are in Europe (with 39.7% of all sites in Germany, 36.1% in Poland, 33.6% in France and 26.4% in Russia).Dummy web server in Debian?
Thomas Goirand recently proposed to relax or even remove some dependencies of web applications on a web server package. This would help users wanting to install such web applications in chroots, while the web server is installed only outside the chroot. During the following discussion, several solutions were proposed, such as providing a dummy web server package in Debian. It was pointed out that such dummy packages are actually very easy to create with the equivs package, which deserves to be better known.Aptitude strikes back
Christian Perrier blogged about the recent revival of the aptitude package manager. As the main maintainer had less time to dedicate to it, the number of bugs against aptitude was continually growing and reached more than 800. But last November, Daniel Harwig and Manuel A. Fernandez Montecelo started working on it, triaging bugs and preparing a possible new version. If you want to help them, join the aptitude-devel mailing list on Alioth.About donations to Debian
Stefano Zacchiroli blogged about how donations to Debian are used by the project. First of all, Stefano explained how money is used in the Debian Project: to buy hardware and hardware-related services for Debian infrastructure, to sponsor contributor sprints, or to support travel expenses in order to allow Debian Developers to represent Debian at conferences and meetings. Then, Stefano noted that almost all donations to Debian come from private citizens and not from big corporate sponsors: corporates mostly sponsor DebConf (the Debian annual conference). At the end, Stefano pointed out that it's possible to check how Debian spends donated money: by reading the minutes of SPI monthly meetings or the list of sprints, visiting the DPL wiki page and consulting the DebConf reports. Stefano also added that over the next month he will be working to further improve the transparency of Debian's budget.Armhf status in Debian
Steve McIntyre blogged about the status of the armhf port in Debian. Since mid-2011, he has been working on armhf as a new architecture in "debian-ports"; then in December it was imported into the main Debian archive. The current state of auto-building can be viewed at the armhf buildd status page.IGMP denial of service in Linux
Ben Hutchings wrote an interesting report on a security issue in Linux found by himself while working on bug #654876. As his laptop running Linux 3.0 or 3.1 crashed repeatedly, Simon McVittie — the bug submitter — thought it could be a driver bug. But, analysing the log of the crash, Ben noted that "a packet received through the wireless interface was being processed by IGMP, which then divided by zero." IGMP packets are used to support multicast routers: as Ben explained, "every multicast address corresponds to a dynamic set of hosts, called a multicast group". In order to know which hosts belong to which groups, the router sends packets and the computer replies at intervals. There are three different versions of the IGMP protocol used to define the Maximum Response Time (MRT) of the computer. Ben found that the crash was caused by a division by 0 of packets with an MRT of 0. The patch is included in Linux 3.0.17, 3.1.9, 3.2.1, and the Debian packaged version 3.1.8-2.Well done, Ben!
Interviews
There has been one "People behind Debian" interview: with Steve McIntyre (Debian CD maintainer and former Debian Project Leader).
Other news
Gerfried Fuchs wrote an interesting article about a Release Critical bug-squashing effort for Stable. Stable RC bugs are often not noted, as people usually concentrate on Unstable RC bugs, but - as Gerfried noted - "it is one of our supported releases and thus should receive quite some attention, at least by the corresponding package maintainers themself."Upcoming events
You can find more information about Debian-related events and talks on the events section of the Debian web site, or subscribe to one of our events mailing lists for different regions: Europe, Netherlands, Hispanic America, North America.Status of Debian Installer localisation
In his last report on Debian Installer localisation, Christian Perrier noted that twenty-two languages are currently up to date for D-I's core files; ten (Czech, German, Spanish, French, Italian, Kazakh, Dutch, Portuguese, Russian and Slovak) are 100% complete for the moment.The newsletter for the Debian community
published on Mon Jan 9 00:00:00 2012 in weekly-news
Welcome to this year's first issue of DPN, the newsletter for the Debian community. Topics covered in this issue include:
Debian Edu/Skolelinux 6.0.3 beta2 released
Petter Reinholdtsen announced the release of Debian Edu Squeeze 6.0.3 beta2: download and installation instructions are available on the wiki, and in particular a useful "Getting Started" chapter in which you can find explanations of how to log in for the first time. Feedback and installation reports can be sent to the Debian Edu mailing list.Bits from the DPL
Stefano Zacchiroli sent some bits from the DPL in which he reported about the work done by Martin Michlmayr as Auditor, in order to reconstruct Debian's expenses and budgets. Stefano also sent a call for help for Wheezy artwork organisation, and announced that Gunnar Wolf has volunteered to monitor the discussion regarding the Creative Commons process for revision 4.0 on behalf of Debian.Forthcoming new release of the X server
Cyril Brulebois blogged about the forthcoming X server release 1.12: one major change is the addition of XI2.2 patches, which are related to multitouch support. Another significant change is the addition of support for Intel's Sandy Bridge New Acceleration in the Debian packages.Scientific article on Debian in PNAS
Michael Hanke noted that the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science ("PNAS") of the United States of America has a paper on the evolution of software in Debian.New Debian Infographic
Claudio Filho has published a beautiful infographic about Debian. The main motivation was, as Claudio said, "to "draw" for final users how Debian can be good for them".Similar efforts have been made by Stéphane Blondon and Chris Lamb, who created the Debian Timeline website and the related Debian package.
New interface for Debtags website
Enrico Zini announced a new interface for the Debtags website. Debtags is a project to classify Debian packages by adding tags to them: "Debtags attaches categories (we call them tags) to packages, creating a new set of useful structured metadata that can be used to implement more advanced ways of presenting, searching, maintaining and navigating the package archive", Enrico said while presenting the project in 2005. Using the new interface, it is possible to search packages, take a look at statistics about Debtags and, obviously, help with the tagging effort. For more information about Debtags, you can visit the related wiki page.apt-get purge defoma
Paul Wise reported that the transition from defoma to fontconfig is finally complete. Defoma is the Debian-specific font manager, long unmaintained, while the replacement (fontconfig) is cross-distribution and also has wide support from upstreams. In the past three years the Debian Fonts Task Force has worked a lot in order to gain this result, thanks especially to the work of Christian Perrier and Paul Wise. Please note that the transition is not completely smooth: "Xorg does not yet support fontconfig so for now programs relying on server-side fonts will only be able to use the xfonts- packages shipping their fonts in the directories known by the X server" and in addition "there are some issues with Ghostscript and CJK", Paul said.Further interviews
Since the last issue of the Debian Project News, two new issues of the "This week in Debian" podcast have been published: with Jonathan Nadeau, about the Northeast GNU/Linux Fest; and with Raphaël Hertzog, about the Debian handbook.
Other news
The 27th issue of the miscellaneous news for developers has been released and covers the following topics:Upcoming events
You can find more information about Debian related events and talks on the events section of the Debian web site, or subscribe to one of our events mailing lists for different regions: Europe, Netherlands, Hispanic America, North America.Status of Debian Installer localisation
In his last report on Debian Installer localisation, Christian Perrier noted that eighteen languages are currently up to date for D-I's core files; ten (Czech, German, Spanish, French, Italian, Kazakh, Dutch, Portuguese, Russian and Slovak) are 100% complete for the moment.The newsletter for the Debian community
published on Wed Dec 14 00:00:00 2011 in weekly-news
Welcome to this year's fifteenth issue of DPN, the newsletter for the Debian community. Topics covered in this issue include:
Volunteers needed for publicity team
As you may have noticed, it has been quite some time since the last edition of Debian Project News. To improve the frequency of DPN and expand its other activities, the Debian Publicity team is looking for new contributors. Did you ever want to help Debian, but every piece of software you were interested in was already packaged? You don't consider yourself a "technical person"? You have basic skills in written English? Perfect! Have you considered joining the Publicity Team? If you are a Debian member, the Press team is also looking for new contributors.Removal of sun-java6 from the archive
The release of Java update 29 from Oracle marks not only security updates, but a change to the licensing, removing Debian's ability to distribute the non-free JVM. The clause in the Java license under which we were able to distribute Java, the DLJ, has been removed. As a result, the sun-java6 package is no longer suitable for the archive, and has been removed, as documented in Debian Bug #646524. Sylvestre Ledru suggests that sun-java6 installs be migrated to openjdk, the open-source alternative, using the following command:apt-get --purge remove sun-java6-jre && apt-get install openjdk-7-jre.
Kai Wasserbäch has also been pointed out elsewhere
that this upgrade path might not be suitable for all Java programs, and special
attention should be paid to re-testing installed Java applications on OpenJDK.
Debian SDL packaging team revival
The SDL packaging team has recently been seriously revived, with Dominique Dumont reorganising the team and Manuel A. Fernandez Montecelo joining the effort. Packaging is progressively moving to Git for easier collaboration, and developers maintaining SDL-related packages not in the team's repository have been invited to join, too. A lot of old bugs have already been fixed and new SDL 1.3 and sdl-perl packages have been uploaded to experimental. SDL 1.3 brings support for newer OpenGL APIs, input improvements like multi-touch, gestures and force feedback device support, better Unicode support and support for multiple windows and displays.Bits from the DPL
Stefano Zacchiroli sent his "Bits from the DPL" for October and November. He reminds us that the New Maintainer Process has been renamed as the New Member Process, and that a list of "easy hacks" is a very effective way of attracting contributors to teams. He notes that Ubuntu plan to deprecate their package review platform (REVU) in favour of converging on mentors.debian.net. This will need some Debexpo changes and also more package sponsorship by Debian members. Stefano has approved funds for the recent DebConf video team sprint and also hardware replacements for lists.debian.org and ftp.debian.org, which have now arrived and are in the process of being set up by DSA. He reports that Fathi Boudra represented Debian at the Software Freedom Day in Algeria. Stefano also reported on his trademark-related activities, including a contact point for inquiries related to the Debian trademark, seeking legal advice on how trademark law applies to Debian packaging activities, and starting a discussion on the relationships between the DFSG and trademark restrictions. He is also working on a statement to make explicit the position of the Debian Project on software patents. The OSI have invited the Debian Project to their upcoming affiliation programme. There is also work in progress to have the Debian Project become a member of the forums for ISC software that we distribute. Stefano also mentioned his continuing work in creating a discussion forum for companies that have a strategic interest in Debian.Ubuntu appreciates Debian
As part of Ubuntu's recent Community Appreciation Day, Michael Hall sent Debian a message of appreciation, stating "Without you we wouldn't be able to make the contributions we do. Ubuntu is great because Debian is great, and we appreciate all of the work that goes into making it that way." Michael will be joining Canonical's Community Team, focusing on projects that are upstream for Ubuntu.India mini-DebConf, Mangalore edition
Christian Perrier reported on his participation in the mini-DebConf in Mangalore, south-west India. The conference was held at Nitte MahaLinga Adyanthaya Memorial Institute of Technology and organised by Vasudev Kamath and a team of computer-science students from the college with support from staff, including the college principal, Dr. S. Y. Kulakarni. Christian gave the opening talk, introducing Debian, how to contribute, and information about Debian internationalisation and localisation. Later Jonas Smedegaard presented a talk about Debian Pure Blends, focusing on how distributions derived from Debian can work inside Debian instead of outside of it. This was part of his trip promoting Debian and Debian Pure Blends in Asia. The talks were followed on the second day with sessions on localisation, packaging, OpenPGP keys and contributing to Debian. The event was publicised in one of the major newspapers in India, namely "The Hindu". Events such as these are vital to local communities. The participation of "international" contributors in these events often brings more attention to them and is highly appreciated by the local community.New mirror in El Salvador
The Debian mirrors team is happy to announce the first mirror in El Salvador, sponsored by the Ministry of Health, with the help of René Mayorga and Carlos Juan Martín Pérez. Salvadorian Debian users are invited to update their/etc/apt/sources.list in order to use
ftp.sv.debian.org.
To quote Carlos Juan Martín Pérez "For us, the Ministry of Health, and as
members of the Salvadorian Community of Free Software, is an honour to belong
to the great Debian family."
For other countries, the full list of mirrors
is available online.
There are still many countries lacking good connectivity to a Debian mirror;
sponsors interested in hosting are invited to contact the mirrors team.
Debexpo maintainers call for contributions
Discussing the potential integration of packaging teams into Debexpo, the software behind the mentors.debian.net service, Arno Töll issued a call for contributions, since the current team members are busy.Bug Squashing Party marathon started
Similarly to previous releases, a marathon of Bug Squashing Parties (BSPs) has been started with concurrent BSPs being held in Hildesheim, Germany and Portland, OR, USA. While the first one concentrated on fixing Release Critical bugs, the second concentrated on creating multiarch patches for different libraries.Call for talks: FOSDEM 2012
Wouter Verhelst sent a call for talks for the distribution developers room at the upcoming FOSDEM 2012, the Free and Open Source Software Developers' European Meeting. The FOSDEM takes place in Brussels, Belgium in early February 2012. Acceptable sessions can be any wide range of things, including talks, BoF sessions, and round tables. Two cross-distributions devrooms are intended to be for people from any participating distribution project, and may cover Debian-specific subjects, or indeed targeted at Debian developers only.New s390 buildd at Karlsruhe Institute of Technology
Philipp Kern announced that zemlinsky, a new Debian buildd hosted at Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, is now available to support the s390(x) ports. Thanks to this new host, s390x is progressing pretty quickly: this new fast builder is one of the reasons why the slope is so steep.The newsletter for the Debian community
published on Fri Nov 4 00:00:00 2011 in weekly-news
Welcome to this year's fourteenth issue of DPN, the newsletter for the Debian community. Topics covered in this issue include:
Updated Debian: 6.0.3 and 5.0.9 released
The third update for Debian 6.0 (codename "Squeeze") and the ninth update for Debian 5.0 (codename "Lenny") have been released. These updates mainly add corrections for security problems to the stable and oldstable releases, along with some adjustments for serious problems.DebConf12 official dates
The DebConf team announced the final and official dates for DebConf12: DebCamp will be held from July 1 to 7 2012, followed by DebConf from July 8 to 14, in Managua, Nicaragua. DebConf will be preceded by a day during which the doors are opened to the general public, commonly called Debian Day. For further information, please visit the DebConf12 web pages.Debian Installer localisation
Christian Perrier reported some new progress in Debian Installer localisation. Nineteen languages are now up to date for D-I's core files; eight (Czech, Dutch, French, German, Persian, Portuguese, Russian and Swedish) are 100% complete for the moment, and many more should reach this hall of fame pretty soon, thanks to the translators.Feedback after DebConf11
After his "This week in Debian" interview, Adnan Hodzic wrote a summary of DebConf11 and its consequences. He offers an inside view of DebConf organisation, sharing some of the stresses and the amazing experiences he had with other organisers. Among the after-effects: the Government of Republika Srpska may seriously consider free and open source software for their own use, and Adnan has taken a vacation to prepare himself for his next projects.Uses of Emdebian
Continuing his series on Emdebian, Neil Williams posted an article about the use of Emdebian on special purpose computers. The common features of special purpose computers include: single task only, single-user support, single mode input, restricted connectivity, constrained user data. On this kind of computer Emdebian is very popular for many reasons, such as the multi-tasking kernel and userspace which provide a responsive machine, or the mere fact that in Emdebian (unlike proprietary competitors) the graphical software is trivially separated from the core software. But the most important reason is that Emdebian Grip allows better debugging: in fact, "Emdebian Grip is binary compatible with the equivalent Debian suite and when a bug appears in the high level user interface, it is much easier to debug that on the desktop than on the device", said Neil.Bits from the DPL
Stefano Zacchiroli reminded us that Wheezy is a few months away from its freeze: everyone can help. He reported about some discussions that are worth attention; about maintainers' and porters' responsibilities; reasons not to use private email aliases; etc. Stefano gave updates about sprints (for coordinating which there is a new mailing list) and the trademark policy. He also recently attended the "Linux Day" in Parma, Italy, and the Ubuntu Developer Summit in Orlando, Florida.New Member process
Enrico Zini announced that the "New Maintainer process" has changed its name, to become the "New Member process": the procedure is still the same, and even its initials are unchanged, but its name is no longer confusing and ambiguous. Thanks to Stefano Zacchiroli for his proposal. Jan Hauke Rahm also joined the New Member Front Desk, which can now be reached at nm@debian.org.Further interviews
Since the last issue of the Debian Project News, two new issues of the "This week in Debian" podcast have been published: with Jonathan Nadeau, who talks about the Ohio LinuxFest and his internship at the FSF; and with Adnan Hodzic, who talks about DebConf11.
Other news
Julien Cristau announced that in the current testing Debian distribution, the default Python version pointed at by the /usr/bin/python symlink is now Python 2.7.DebConf12 dates announced
published on Wed Nov 2 20:29:00 2011 in debconf-news
The DebConf team just sent out a press release announcing the dates for DebConf12 in Nicaragua.
- Dates: July 1-7, 2012 will be DebCamp and July 8-14, 2012 will be DebConf.
- Press release text
- About DebConf12
- Contribute
We hope to see many of you there!
Video recordings - consider them done!
published on Sun Jul 31 11:39:00 2011 in debconf-news
The headline is not entirely correct, there are still a very few recordings missing but the awesome videoteam (/me bowes) has already relased 75 low and 64 high quality encodings! Missing stuff will be added when it’s ready.
As usual you can get them all from the Debian videoteam archive. All available recordings are also linked from the DebConf11 schedule. For the first time we licenced our work under CC-BY 3.0.
Please leave a comment on wiki/DebConf11/Videoteam/Thanks.
Personally I’d like to deeply thank everybody who made DebConf11 a success! I’m proud to be part of a great and diverse community working on achieving their one common goal: to create the best free operating system! Have fun on the way!
How to contribute via irc
published on Sun Jul 24 16:19:00 2011 in debconf-news
If you would like to contribute to a session while watching the live
stream, please join the respective IRC channels. These are:
#debconf-auditorium and #debconf-roundroom on irc.debian.org. The
Web 2.0 thingy
at http://debconf11.debconf.org/watch.xhtml
will be updated soonish.
DebianDay about to start / Video Streams are now available
published on Sun Jul 24 07:59:00 2011 in debconf-news
Sorry for the late notification about the video streams. We’ve been rather busy down here. However, DebianDay is about to start, and it looks, like it will turn out to be a great event!
The Video Setup is finished, too. The easiest way to watch the streams and
to participate via irc is by using the Web 2.0
thingy at http://debconf11.debconf.org/watch.xhtml.
You can also point your preferred video player at http://video.debconf.org:8000/Roundroom.ogv for the smaller round room, or http://video.debconf.org:8000/Auditorium.ogv for the larger auditorium, where DebianDay will take place.
The full schedule for the entire conference is available at http://penta.debconf.org/dc11_schedule/index.en.html. As usual we’ll make the videos available for download later.
Behind the scenes with the DebConf team
published on Tue Jul 12 00:49:00 2011 in debconf-news
This Thursday we’ll be running a special IRC session, “Behind the scenes with the DebConf team”.
Details:
- When: 19 UTC on 2011-07-14
- Where: #debian-meeting on irc.debian.org (OFTC)
- Log: http://wiki.debian.org/IRC/debian-meeting (after the session has finished!)
This is an open session aimed at anyone who would like to find out more about how DebConf is organised. Of course, we’d love you to get involved in organising it yourself, by helping out at DebConf11 or helping plan future DebConfs, but it’s also fine to attend the session just because you are curious!
Debian Project News 2010/16
published on Mon Nov 22 00:00:00 2010 in weekly-news
Welcome to this year's sixteenth issue of DPN, the newsletter for the Debian community. Topics covered in this issue include:
State of Debian 6.0 "Squeeze"
Release Manager Neil McGovern gave an update for the upcoming Debian 6.0 "Squeeze" stable release. As "Squeeze is almost in its final form" he calls for upgrade and installation tests (see also the separate announcement for that). He also notes that even (experienced) users who have no systems available for installation or upgrade tests can help by triaging installation reports and upgrade reports, or propose text for the release notes.Highlights from the Debian linux-2.6 Meeting
A report from Maximilian Attems on the Debian kernel group's meeting at the Paris mini-Debconf in October was sent to the Debian kernel mailing list. Among the things they discussed was the move to Git as a source code management tool, allowing the kernel group to not have to "update infrastructure in separate branches as we have to do now."The report also mentions the reduction of Linux kernel patches for Wheezy: "Several patches got pushed or landed since 2.6.32, thus state is in general good." Much more (e.g. about different patches for virtualisation, the need for automated tests, and Linux Security Modules) can be read in the original email.
New default artwork for Debian "Squeeze"
Yves-Alexis Perez announced the results of the Debian Squeeze Artwork contest: the winner is the theme Space Fun by Valessio Brito. Congratulations!The new theme has been added to the desktop-base package, and is already available in Debian's development branch "Sid".
Debian Women IRC Training Sessions
The Debian Women project launched a new initiative to encourage more people, and specifically women, to contribute to Debian while introducing them to different aspects of the Debian Project: IRC Training Sessions. The first session took place last Thursday, and was visited by many interested people. Longtime Debian contributor Lars Wirzenius gave an introduction to Debian packaging and was available for all kinds of questions. The training session is also available as a tutorial on the Debian wiki.More training sessions with topics like "Bug Tracking System usage", "Using Git", and "Python libraries and application packaging" (and many other interesting topics) are already planned in the Debian wiki.
Bits from the DPL
Debian Project Leader Stefano Zacchiroli sent another bits from the DPL report. He mentions events he has attended (see for example his separate short report about the Ubuntu Developer Summit) and the Debian Sprint program, making it easier for Debian Contributors to meet for developer gatherings. Last but not least he also asks for midterm feedback about his work as DPL.Bits from the Debian Multimedia Maintainers
Alessio Treglia sent some bits from the Debian Multimedia Maintainers. While also giving a small introduction to this team, he concentrates on multimedia related features for consumers as well as producers in the upcoming Debian 6.0 "Squeeze". Some of the highlights for consumers are a "non-crippled" version of ffmpeg and the introduction of a mencoder package. He also gave an overview of multimedia production related platforms, technologies and end user applications.Interview with Debian Developer Joey Hess
Raphaël Hertzog published an interview with long-time Debian Developer Joey Hess, who's already well known to Debian Developers for his work on debconf, the configuration system for Debian packages, debhelper, a collection of helper scripts to ease package creation, or the debian-installer (d-i for short). When he was asked about his biggest achievement, he answered: "But while it might sound corny, I am more proud of the accumulation of all the smaller things done in the context of Debian". Joey Hess, who by the way also once laid the base for this newsletter, also gives some insights about his plans for Debian "Wheezy", what person he most admires, and whether he regrets having written most of his applications in Perl.Revival of the m68k port?
Although Debian supported the Motorola 680x0 processors from Debian 2.0 "Hamm", support for that architecture was dropped with Debian 4.0 "Etch" for various reasons. One of the main factors was limited support of the C library and other parts of the toolchain. However, Thorsten Glaser recently started to work on these issues. He has already made some progress and reports having been able to compile 84 core source packages for a first "sort of re-bootstrapping".Other news
Luca Bruno reported on the Italian l10n community. While he confesses that the Italian language team has failed at attracting new members, he also reported about quite successful "online sprints" which took place recently.New Debian Contributors
7 applicants have been accepted as Debian Developers, 5 applicants have been accepted as Debian Maintainers, and 28 people started to maintain packages since the previous issue of the Debian Project News. Please welcome Luis Uribe, Julián Moreno Patiño, Julien Viard de Galbert, Jeremie Corbier, Muammar El Khatib, Julien Valroff, Heiko Stuebner, Niels Thykier, David Bremner, John Sullivan, Bernhard Reiter, Lisandro Damián Nicanor Pérez Meyer, LIU Qi Makoto Yamashita, Hubert Pham, Mathias Behrle, Andrew Ross, Sascha Girrulat, Barry Warsaw, Michael Tokarev, Pekko Metsä, Estêvão Samuel Procópio, Roman Haefeli, Massimo Manghi, Ishan Bansal, William Grzybowski, Daniele Tricoli, David Steele, Mackenzie Morgan, Fernando Tarlá Cardoso Lemos, Xiangfu Liu, Sten Spans, David Banks, Stéphan Gorget, Arnout Engelen, Samuel Ribeiro da Costa Vale, Rosea Grammostola, Daniel Echeverry, Davi Leal, and Williams Orellana into our project!
Release-critical bugs statistics for the upcoming release
According to the Bugs Search interface of the Ultimate Debian Database, the upcoming release, Debian 6.0 "Squeeze", is currently affected by 200 release-critical bugs. Ignoring bugs which are easily solved or on the way to being solved, roughly speaking, about 123 release-critical bugs remain to be solved for the release to happen.
Debian Project News 2010/15
published on Mon Nov 8 00:00:00 2010 in weekly-news
Welcome to this year's fifteenth issue of DPN, the newsletter for the Debian community. Topics covered in this issue include:
Debian and "Google Code-in 2010"
After Debian has been successfully participated in the last "Google Summer of Code", where Google sponsored students during the summer holidays to work on specific task for Open Source projects, a new campaign for pre-university students is now started: the Google Code-in 2010. In this new contest, pre-university students may work on smaller tasks during one or two weeks, and in the end may win T-Shirts, money and other prices. Coordination is done again by Obey Arthur Liu, who already started a general wiki page and is now collecting tasks.Report from openSUSE Conference
Gerfried Fuchs sent a report of the openSUSE Conference where she has been representing Debian through a talk about "Debian - The Project and its Resources" whose slides are available. One topic raised was about package naming schemes, sometimes diverting from upstream for consistency reasons, so inter-distribution tools would require some layer to map the package name from one distribution to another.Debian Installer 6.0 Beta1 release
The first beta release of the installer for Debian Squeeze has been released on October 30th, 2010. This release is dedicated to Frans Pop, who was heavily involved in several aspects of Debian Installer until he passed away, and whose loss is deeply regretted.Minutes from mini-DebConf Paris
The first mini-DebConf Paris has just been held a week ago in the PPS laboratory of Université Paris 7. According to Stefano Zacchiroli, it was a complete success gathering about 150 people from all over Europe. Stefano finalized the Debian Sprint Program, and Lucas Nussbaum worked on UDD and his piuparts replacement between two talks. The Bug Squashing Party also permitted to close (and fill) some bugs.Mini-DebConf in Ho Chi Minh City
For the first time in Vietnam, the fifth mini-DebConf in Asia will be held during FOSSASIA 2010 in Ho Chi Minh City on November 12-14, 2010. The mini-DebConf will feature talks from different Debian Developers and contributers covering technical, social and policy topics, as well as a translation workshop to foster the Vietnamese translation community and to teach how to translate in Debian. More information is available at the organisation page.Bits from the Website Team
Gerfried Fuchs sent some Bits from the Website Team in which she summarized the recent activities of the team. Besides announcing that www-master was recently moved to another host, she reported the progress made in the website redesign process. Since several months, in fact, Gerfried Fuchs and Martin Zobel-Helas are working on implementing the Kalle Söderman's proposal for the new website design across different sites and there are already available several previews: www.deb.at, debienna.at, dsa.debian.org, git.deb.at, lists.deb.at, packages.deb.at, and planet.deb.at. You can follow the further progress on the related wiki page and help the team testing new design with different web browser. The mail ends with a call for further contributors, which are always welcome. A lot of different things need to get done, and not all of them require specific skills.Further "This week in Debian" interviews
Since the last issue of the Debian Project News, four new issues of the "This week in Debian" podcast have been published: with Axel Beckert, member of the kFreeBSD Project; with Samuel Thibault, member of Debian's accessibility team; with Moritz Muehlenhoff, member of the Security Team from the Debian Project; and with Niels Thykier, maintainer of the Eclipse Package and Java Package.Other news
The twenty-fourth issue of the miscellaneous news for developers has been released and covers the following topics:New Debian Contributors
6 people started to maintain packages since the previous issue of the Debian Project News. Please welcome Daniele Napolitano, Tshepang Lekhonkhobe, Roy Marples, Dipankar Patro, Deepak Tripathi, Bilal Akhtar and Etienne Millon into our project!
Release-critical bugs statistics for the upcoming release
According to the Bugs Search interface of the Ultimate Debian Database, the upcoming release, Debian 6.0 "Squeeze", is currently affected by 284 release-critical bugs. Ignoring bugs which are easily solved or on the way to being solved, roughly speaking, about 126 release-critical bugs remain to be solved for the release to happen.
Debian Project News 2010/14
published on Mon Oct 18 00:00:00 2010 in weekly-news
Welcome to this year's fourteenth issue of DPN, the newsletter for the Debian community. Topics covered in this issue include:
State of Debian 6.0 "Squeeze"
After the release team recently met in Paris they published meeting minutes and gave a release update. Aside from updating the documentation for point releases and deciding about the future of the volatile archive, a major topic was the progress of the upcoming release of Debian 6.0 "Squeeze". They called for content for the Release Notes, which should document all potential problems during an upgrade. They also noted that all transitions have been done, and named the current blockers of the release: a bug in udev which might cause problems during upgrades (a patch has been proposed in the meantime); a problem in the preinstallation script of dash (a patch has been proposed and is currently being investigated); the need for debian-installer to reach its final release; the lack of proper documentation in the Release Notes for "Squeeze" installs and upgrades; and finally the requirement for the security archive to support the new source format 3.0.New question and answer service at ask.debian.net
With the help of the Shapado Project, members of the Debian project started a new user oriented service at ask.debian.net. It lets users ask specific questions and find answers, while also providing rating systems and badges for users. It allows Debian Developers and other contributors to easily stay in touch with the community.Updated DebianEdu released
The DebianEdu Project has released an updated version of its Debian Pure Blend targeting schools and similar environments. This update includes an updated installer to support new hardware as well as various bug fixes and documentation improvements. Other notable changes are improvements of site summary where several Nagios checks have been added to monitor system health as well as a fix for shutdown-at-night.New "sloppy" backports suite for stable Debian "Lenny"
Gerfried Fuchs from Debian's backports team announced a new suite on backports for Debian "Lenny": "lenny-backports-sloppy". Its usage is similar to the regular backports suite, but there's a major difference in the contents of the suites: while users of the normal backports suite can expect to update without major problems to the next Debian stable release (as it only contains backports of the next following distribution), users of the newly created backports-sloppy suite may need to take special precautions, as the backports of the sloppy suite are not restricted to coming from the next distribution, but may come from the second-next. The new suite thus may also contain newer packages (e.g. during the freeze already from the "unstable" branch). It therefore allows users to easily access newer versions of packages; but users can not just upgrade to the following stable release. They will at least need to upgrade to using the backports suite for the next release.General resolution about Debian project membership
After Debian Project Leader Stefano Zacchiroli proposed a general resolution about non-packaging Debian project members, this resolution is currently being voted on. If it passes it would invite Debian's Account Managers to establish procedures to evaluate and accept non-packaging contributors to the project including full voting rights. Non-packaging contributors include for example documentation writers and translators.Hybrid installer image for optical and USB devices
Joey Hess blogged about a hybrid debian-installer for USB and optical discs. While it has been possible to boot debian-installer from USB sticks for quite some time, the procedure to make such a bootable USB stick has been quite difficult. The new hybrid ISO image can be burned to CDs as well as simply copied raw (with cat) to USB devices. It is also very easy to add additional firmware. Joey also mentions that due to problems with the jigdo templates, currently only a minimal hybrid image is created, but he points out that it is very easy to make the existing ISO images suitable for USB sticks by using the isohybrid command from the syslinux package.About the non-news of package removals in Debian's testing branch
Is it newsworthy if packages, even popular ones like the Chromium web browser, get removed or added to Debian's testing branch? Debian Project Leader Stefano Zacchiroli doesn't think so and points out that Chromium is a good example for the non-newsworthiness of these things. It had been removed from Debian's testing branch, causing a media fuss and some criticism, as it appeared that Chromium would not be part of the next stable release. However, as the release critical bugs have been fixed, the package was allowed back again. Which is - according to Stefano - actually not newsworthy either.Following Debian Mailing lists via micro-blogging services
Valessio Brito announced the beta version of a new service allowing users of micro-blogging services to follow the topics of various Debian mailing lists. It is possible to search for particular tags, bugs, meetings, or specific work."Four days" promise for Debian Mentees
The current approach of mentoring new package maintainers who can't upload packages themselves is far from perfect as it doesn't ensure mentees get feedback. Asheesh Laroia and Niels Thykier tried to come up with a solution. As a first step they started a campaign promising to ensure that all mails on the debian-mentors list get an answer within four days. The second step is a rewrite of the mentors.debian.net service allowing mentees to upload packages to a central location. "debexpo" will not only allow mentees to upload their packages and run some limited tests, but will also allow mentors and other people to check and comment on the packages. However, some help is still needed before the new service can go online.Who's using Debian?
Are you interested to know why other people use Debian? No problem! Debian maintains a list of Debian users ranging from governmental or educational institutions up to dozens of companies, of which surprisingly not all are IT related. Fernando C. Estrada summarised some of the entries and their reasons. You can send us new submissions via e-mail.Why do people contribute to Debian?
Why do people contribute to Debian? Long-term Debian Developer Raphaël Hertzog tried to answer that often asked question by summarising what motivates him personally in his contributions to Debian: technical excellence, inspiring goals, high impact work, working with great people, and recognition of work.Further "This week in Debian" interviews
Since the last issue of the Debian Project News, three new issues of the "This week in Debian" podcast have been published: with Ben Hutchings, member of Debian's kernel maintenance team; with Margarita Manterola about the Debian Women Project; and with Neil McGovern, member of Debian's release team.Other news
Arnt Ove Gregersen created a female version of the DebianEdu/Skolelinux mascot.New Debian Contributors
5 applicants have been accepted as Debian Developers and 7 applicants have been accepted as Debian Maintainers, while 13 people started to maintain packages since the previous issue of the Debian Project News. Please welcome Salvatore Bonaccorso, Jeffrey Ratcliffe, Deepak Tripathi, Michael Schutte, Ansgar Burchardt, Federico Ceratto, Tanguy Ortolo, Jonathan Yu, Mats Erik Andersson, Ryan Kavanagh, Stefan Bauer, Stuart Prescott, Andreas Noteng, Gustavo Panizzo, Julien Jehannet, Kevin Roy, Marek Brudka, Richard Holland, David Hannequin, John Feuerstein, Hans-Christoph Steiner, James Goppert, John Stumpo, Nicolas Bonnefon and Mònica Ramírez Arceda into our project!
Release-critical bugs statistics for the upcoming release
According to the bug-tracking web interface of the Ultimate Debian Database, the upcoming release, Debian 6.0 "Squeeze", is currently affected by 327 release-critical bugs. Ignoring bugs which are easily solved or on the way to being solved, roughly speaking, about 130 release-critical bugs remain to be solved for the release to happen.
Debian Project News 2010/13
published on Mon Oct 4 00:00:00 2010 in weekly-news
Welcome to this year's thirteenth issue of DPN, the newsletter for the Debian community. Topics covered in this issue include:
An update on Constantly Usable Testing (CUT)
Raphaël Hertzog wrote a detailed article on the recent activity surrounding the Constantly Usable Testing (CUT) proposal. CUT would be a Debian distribution based on testing, but with significant differences that make it more usable, i.e. more polished and stable. In the article he talks about the potential value of a "rolling" release and how it might work.Bits from the FTPMasters
The FTP Team met two weekends ago in Fulda, Germany. While there appeared to be a shortage of baklava, there was no shortage of Debian related work and discussion. Jörg Jaspert in the meeting minutes made a call for volunteers. Being an FTPMaster is a hard job and one that many people inside and outside of Debian take for granted. Thanks very much for the hard work, FTPMasters.Report about this year's "Google Summer of Code"
Obey Arthur Liu wrote a report about Debian's participation in this year's "Google Summer of Code", where Google pays students to work on and with specific FLOSS projects. Debian was accepted as a mentoring organisation for the fifth time in a row. Again it was a great success with eight students completing their projects successfully. He also quoted some of the students' project reports.Bits from the Publicity Team
Debian's Publicity Team posted some bits informing Debian Developers, Contributors and the Community how best to make contact with them and especially how to help. Helping the team may range from assisting with the Debian Project News (you do want to continue reading it, don't you?), proposing "dents" for Debian's official identi.ca account, or being available for a This Week in Debian podcast.Other news
Joey Hess was quite pleased to see some of his tools being referenced in a recent movie.New Debian Contributors
3 people started to maintain packages since the previous issue of the Debian Project News. Please welcome Dimitrios Eftaxiopoulos, Pierre-Louis Bonicoli, and Hector Romojaro into our project!
Release-critical bugs statistics for the upcoming release
According to the Bugs Search interface of the Ultimate Debian Database, the upcoming release, Debian 6.0 "Squeeze", is currently affected by 301 release-critical bugs. Ignoring bugs which are easily solved or on the way to being solved, roughly speaking, about 177 release-critical bugs remain to be solved for the release to happen.
Debian Project News 2010/12
published on Tue Sep 21 00:00:00 2010 in weekly-news
Welcome to this year's twelfth issue of DPN, the newsletter for the Debian community. Topics covered in this issue include:
Linux Mint Debian Edition
Linux Mint, a Linux distribution whose purpose is to "produce a modern, elegant and comfortable operating system which is both powerful and easy to use", has released an edition based on Debian. This new Linux Mint distribution will track Debian testing, as a more reliable upstream base. Linux Mint appears to be a popular Linux distribution ranking highly at DistroWatch.com as well as other non-scientific measures. Certainly they received a large number of comments to their blog post regarding their new distribution. Anecdotal evidence seems to point to this Debian-based edition as a popular move."Grave" software bugs
Andreas Tille began a short discussion regarding bugs which are not grave software bugs per se, but could cause grave harm to life or property under certain conditions. As an example, the bug in question involved improper data handling that could lead to a medical patient being prescribed medicine which could lead to a possibly fatal reaction. Responses from developers indicated that despite such bugs not being explicitly mentioned in the bug guidelines, they should already fall under release-critical severity and thus should have freeze exceptions and possible Debian Security Advisories if needed. The fix for the bug in question was approved for testing within the day."This week in Debian" interviews Stefano Zacchiroli
Jonathan Nadeau published the first issue of the "This week in Debian" podcast! The podcast is available in Ogg Vorbis format as well as MP3. In this issue he interviewed Debian Project Leader Stefano Zacchiroli about Debian influence in the Linux universe and its link with upstream and derivative developers. Stefano also spoke about the Debian Project and its organisation, and more specifically the Debian Project Leader tasks.etch-backports gone
Alexander Wirt announced that the backports for Debian "Etch" have finally been removed from the servers. Over the lifetime of etch-backports there accumulated a total of 508 different backports, resulting in more than 2250 binary packages for all Debian architectures offered to users. Altogether the available backports and their source occupied 13Gb of disk space on the mirrors. The backports team would like to thank every contributor and mirror administrator for their work and their help which made this possible.Release-critical bugs in stable release
Gerfried Fuchs noticed that recently the number of release-critical bugs in the stable release Debian 5.0 "Lenny" has dropped below the 900 mark, and thanks all who helped keeping that number down. It should be noted that the high number of open release-critical bugs for the stable release contains a fair amount of false positives (e.g. serious "fails to build from source" bugs with newer compiler versions that aren't shipped in the stable release). Previously Gerfried blogged about usage of the Bug Tracking System. If you would like to join the efforts of keeping the bug tracking system clean, please read this post and contact Gerfried should any questions arise.Debian Women Mentoring rebooting
Helen Faulkner noted that the Debian Women mentoring project has been restarted. People interested in being a mentor or getting a mentor should contact the coordinators.Mythbusting Ruby packaging
After hearing some myths about how Ruby is packaged in Debian, Lucas Nussbaum wrote about some of the Ruby myths in his blog. It ranges from general version culture and API stability, over the necessity of package splits, performance issues and porting issues up to communication with the upstream developers and motivation issues. He also noted that due to these problems it's difficult to find new people to join the Ruby packaging teams, and that they are quite understaffed.Debian to welcome non-packaging contributors
In coordination with Debian's Account Managers, Debian Project Leader Stefano Zacchiroli proposed a general resolution to welcome non-packaging contributors as full project members. While the Debian Account Managers already are empowered to do so, and while it is already possible to become an official Debian Developer without doing packaging work, this procedure has rarely been used. So Stefano wants to make a clear sign from the entire project that Debian does welcome and honour non-packaging contributions. This goal has already been achieved partly, as Stefano's proposal got a lot of support in quite a short time-frame. However, the naming of non-packaging contributors as well as possible upload rights are under discussion.Other news
Stephan Gran posted some notes from the meeting of Debian System Administrators in early September in Munich. Besides some internal discussion (e.g. monitoring and configuration management), this also led to a procedure for the handling of guest accounts on debian.org machines.New Debian Contributors
1 applicant has been accepted as a Debian Developer and 1 person started to maintain packages since the previous issue of the Debian Project News. Please welcome Luke Faraone and Andreas Beckmann into our project!
Release-critical bugs statistics for the upcoming release
According to the unofficial release-critical bug counter, the upcoming release, Debian 6.0 "Squeeze", is currently affected by 317 release-critical bugs. Ignoring bugs which are easily solved or on the way to being solved, roughly speaking, about 126 release-critical bugs remain to be solved for the release to happen.
Debian Project News 2010/11
published on Wed Sep 8 00:00:00 2010 in weekly-news
Welcome to this year's eleventh issue of DPN, the newsletter for the Debian community. Topics covered in this issue include:
Debian Project mourns the loss of Frans Pop
The Debian Project lost Frans Pop, who was involved in many ways in Debian: as a maintainer of several packages, a supporter of the S/390 port, and one of the most involved members of the Debian Installer team. He was a Debian Listmaster, editor and release manager of the Installation Guide and the release notes, as well as a Dutch translator. Many members of the Debian community already expressed their sadness. The team behind the Debian Project News would like to do so too: Frans, you will be missed!Bits from the Debian Women project
The Debian Women project aims at getting more women to participate in Debian, as packagers, bug reporters, technical documentation writers, bug fixers, translators, artists and in any other area that helps the development of Debian. These goals are achieved through IRC tutorials, a mentoring program, a mailing list and an IRC channel.DebConf10 DPL report
The Debian Project Leader (DPL), Stefano Zacchiroli, provided a report after the recent DebConf in New York City. In the report he discusses his recent activity speaking with academics in the Social Sciences, as well as some other Debian developments. He also mentions Joey Hess's CUT proposal, a proposal that would help users understand that Debian testing is actually quite usable and work to polish it even more so that this becomes apparent. Our beloved DPL mentions the Release Critical Bug squashing Contest (RCBC) which has prizes!Backports service becoming official
The backports.org, offering updated packages from Debian's testing branch for Debian's stable (and oldstable) releases, has now been integrated as an official Debian service available from backports.debian.org and various mirrors. Current users of the old backports.org service should change their sources.list file, as the directory structure has also changed (but compatibility symlinks are available for now). More details for users are available on the web page. The backports team also published some information for package maintainers.Updated Debian GNU/Linux: 5.0.6 released
A new update release for Debian GNU/Linux 5.0 "Lenny" has been released. All recent security updates have been added as well as some fixes for critical issues. The linux-2.6 package was also updated for increased hardware support. New CD and DVD images as well as update CDs and DVDs will be available soon.Release update
A new release update has been sent out by Neil McGovern. He gave an overview of the status of different transitions, which are mostly done, and informed package maintainers of a stronger policy for unblock requests for packages which should migrate to Debian's "testing" branch. He also noted that packages with release critical bugs will be removed from the release, should there be no progress made on their issues. Work on the release notes is on its way. Anything that should be documented in the release notes should be reported as a bug report against the release-notes pseudo-package, while new and noteworthy things should be collected in the wiki. Finally he announced the codename of Debian 7.0: Wheezy, the rubber toy penguin with a red bow tie.Changelogs for testing available
Jörg Jaspert announced a new service for users of Debian's "testing" branch: the changelogs of packages migrated to the testing branch are now aggregated and available in a single file. This makes it easier for "testing" users to review changes in specific packages before they install them. The files are available from all mirrors in the dists/testing directory, and are rotated on a daily basis, being kept about two days. There's also always a symlink to the latest one.Debian growth over the releases
While analyzing md5sum usage for internal package integrity checks, Romain Francoise also published some numbers about the growth of Debian's archive. To his astonishment Debian's "unstable" branch has grown from about 20,000 packages to over 30,000 within three years!Organising the annual Debian Conference
Richard Darst continued his blog post on how to organise the annual Debian Conference. He covers the topics "What is the DebConf team?", "The DebConf selection process", "How DebConf manages money", "DebConf budgeting for a single conference", "The DebConf registration process", and "DebConf Fund-raising".New signing key for the Debian Archive created
FTP-Master Jörg Jaspert announced details of the new signing key for the Debian archive. The new key has already been added to the debian-archive-keyring package, which was also updated in the recent Debian GNU/Linux 5.0.6 "Lenny" release. The new key will be used once Debian 6.0 "Squeeze" is released or the old key is expired (by the end of 2012). Whichever comes first.Other news
Following the "unofficial" bits from the ARM porters mentioned in last issue, Hector Oron posted official bits. He gave more details about the work in the Hardfloat ARM port, and also listed various supporters of the ARM port, including Linaro, which is a not-for-profit organisation sponsored by engineers and manufacturers with an interest in ARM.New Debian Contributors
7 applicants have been accepted as Debian Maintainer and 6 people started to maintain packages since the previous issue of the Debian Project News. Please welcome Javier Merino Cacho, Kurashiki Satoru, Sebastien Noel, Maia Kozheva, Tanguy Ortolo, Thierry Carrez, Ulrich Dangel, Douglas Kirkland, Alice Ferrazzi, Nicolas Valcárcel Scerpella, Tássia Camões Araújo, Ryan Tandy and Marco Rodrigues into our project!
Release-critical bugs statistics for the upcoming release
According to the unofficial release-critical bug counter, the upcoming release, Debian 6.0 "Squeeze", is currently affected by 226 release-critical bugs. Ignoring bugs which are easily solved or on the way to being solved, roughly speaking, about 129 release critical bugs remain to be solved for the release to happen.
Debian Project News 2010/10
published on Thu Aug 26 00:00:00 2010 in weekly-news
Welcome to this year's tenth issue of DPN, the newsletter for the Debian community. Topics covered in this issue include:
Debian turns 17
The seventeenth birthday of the Debian Project caused quite some media echo, birthday parties and congratulations.Screenshots at packages.debian.org
As it is often easier to get an impression of an application by looking at screenshots, instead of just reading a descriptive text, Gerfried Fuchs has integrated the screenshots.debian.net service into the package information at packages.debian.org. See for example the screenshot of the package extremetuxracer.Some bits from ARM porters
Riku Voipio published some "unofficial bits from the ARM porters" in which he thanked ARM and Canonical for sponsoring new machines for the project. Besides giving Debian Contributors a three times faster machine for their development work, it has allowed the buildd infrastructure of machines automatically building new packages for specific architectures and suites to be renewed, so that experimental packages, volatile packages, non-free packages and packages from backports.org are now automatically built as well. Finally, he announced some work being done on a Hardfloat ARM port, which will work better on newer ARM processors with a hardware floating-point unit.Join the DebConf Team
Richard Darst started a series of blog posts about the organisation of the annual Debian Conference by commenting on the recent "DebConf & Debian" discussion. He doesn't see a difference between the two, and invites all interested people to join the organisation team by subscribing to the DebConf team mailing list and joining the #debconf-team IRC channel on irc.debian.org. In his second post, he explained the timeline of a DebConf.Progress of the Debian GNU/kFreeBSD port
Different aspects of the port of the Debian operating system to the FreeBSD kernel have made great progress recently. The Debian installer has been upgraded to the FreeBSD kernel version 8.1, which also allows the installation system to be used in languages other than English. Also the debian-cd scripts used to create CD and DVD images now support the creation of the new architectures. Daily build images for Debian unstable are already available; daily and weekly builds for "Squeeze" will be made available with the next beta release of the Debian installer. However, the Debian GNU/kFreeBSD related web pages are outdated, and help is needed to fix the web and wiki pages.Bits from the MIA team
Jan Hauke Rahm sent some bits from the MIA team, which tries to identify and handle package maintainers who sadly have become inactive. He gave some advice on how package maintainers should react when they think a package has been neglected by its maintainer, and stressed that the work of the "MIA" team is an important aspect of quality assurance.Other news
Valessio Brito wondered whether a webchat interface similar to the one used during the last Debian conference should be permanently available, to make it easier for users unfamiliar with IRC to join.Release-critical bugs statistics for the upcoming release
According to the unofficial release-critical bug counter, the upcoming release, Debian 6.0 "Squeeze", is currently affected by 302 release-critical bugs. Ignoring bugs which are easily solved or on the way to being solved, roughly speaking, about 128 release critical bugs remain to be solved for the release to happen.
Debian Project News 2010/09
published on Mon Aug 9 00:00:00 2010 in weekly-news
Welcome to this year's ninth issue of DPN, the newsletter for the Debian community. Topics covered in this issue include:
The Debian project Release Team announces an official Freeze
On 6 August at DebConf10 in New York City, Adam D. Barratt and the rest of the Debian Release Team announced that Debian is being frozen in preparation for release. The tentative release goal is before the end of the year. As Adam D. Barratt said, a freeze is a horizontal transition and it means that one doesn't introduce new transitions, or upload packages to unstable which are not intended to be released in "Squeeze". Also, if your package is involved in an ongoing transition, don't upload a new version until it migrates. You can check the transition tracker for more information.Annual Debian Developer Conference 2010 ended
The 2010 annual Debian Developer Conference, DebConf10, which was held at Columbia University in New York City, ended last Saturday on 7 August, 2010. With over 300 Debian Developers, Maintainers, and Users from 40 countries attending, it was one of the most productive conferences ever. Attendees met other developers, worked on projects, toured New York City, and attended talks, thus forming strong community bonds throughout the week long event.A free (as in speech) Debian book in the making
Debian Developers Raphaël Hertzog and Roland Mas have announced their intention to translate their French Debian book into English. Their best-seller covers a wide range of topics from the basics (introducing the community, dpkg, APT, debian-installer, etc.) to more advanced administration tasks (automated installation, virtualization with Xen, RAID/LVM, SELinux, etc.) as well as the most common services (mail, web, firewall, file server, LDAP, etc.). It will be based on the upcoming Debian "Squeeze".Net-installation CD images with firmware available
During the last few weeks, "netinst" CD images (containing the installation system and all packages for the base system, downloading everything else from the Internet) have been available which also contain the partly non-free firmware files needed (e.g.) for some network and WLAN controllers. Now that they have been tested, they have been moved to their final location and can be downloaded from the official download site for the i386, amd64, and powerpc architectures as well as one image to boot all three architectures.Debian Edu/Skolelinux 6.0.0 alpha0 test release
DebianEdu, who adapt Debian for the special needs of schools and similar institutions, released their first test version based upon Debian "Squeeze". Many applications have been updated and added, so testers are asked to take special care about the package selections: missing, unneeded, and untranslated applications should be reported back. Other newly introduced features are the integration of the LXDE desktop environment and a roaming workstation profile for laptops.ZFS support in unstable on kFreeBSD ports
Thanks to Tuco Xyz, Petr Salinger and Aurelien Jarno, zfsutils are now packaged for Debian GNU/kFreeBSD and available in "Sid", including the relevant libraries and a udeb package for the Debian Installer. Its availability also brought some kernel ZFS issues to light which have been fixed in the meantime. Now Debian GNU/kFreeBSD can fully support ZFS.Debian-Accessibility is using Blends web sentinel
The Debian-Accessibility project is now using the web sentinel provided by the Debian Pure Blends effort to show their current work to users. Those who are interested might have a look at theDebian GIS project will release Blends metapackages in "Squeeze"
The Debian GIS project has now released a set of metapackages built using Debian Pure Blends tools which are available in testing (and thus will be released in "Squeeze"). The web sentinel provides an overview of the available GIS and OSM packages in Debian. It would be great if some OpenStreetMap addicts would join this effort.DebiChem project will release Blends metapackages in "Squeeze"
The DebiChem project has likewise released a set of metapackages for "Squeeze" built using Debian Pure Blends tools. See the overview of chemical application packages in Debian and task definition in the Subversion repository.DebConf11 logo contest
While Annual Debian Developers Conference 2010 has just ended, preparations for the 2011 conference have already begun. One example is the DebConf11 logo contest collecting ideas and logos for the conference, which will take place in Banja Luka, Bosnia and Herzegovina.When should services started by init.d scripts be operational?
Petter Reinholdtsen wondered whether a service started by an init.d script should already be operational when the script exits successfully. As the execution of these scripts is ordered based on their dependencies, it can lead to difficult to solve problems (see for example #585966 or #589915) when these scripts exit before their service is completely up and running. A depending service may be called while the service is still only starting up. Josselin Mouette noted that this would be the case for all init.d scripts using the start-stop-daemon with the --background option. Josef Spillner added that services should be able to handle it if services they depend on are temporarily unavailable, e.g. by trying to reconnect.Different statistics about Debian
Anthony Towns published several statistics about Debian, including the average time needed to close bugs and the number of release-critical bugs. The graphs are rendered using JavaScript allowing different filters and zooming into the graphs.Building all files from source
After several bugs had been filed against packages not building Flash files during their build process but shipping precompiled files, Charlie Smotherman wondered whether all files shipped in a Debian package really need to be built from source. Some of the reasons named were quality assurance, conforming with Debian Policy, and compliance with the Debian Free Software Guidelines: being able to modify files distributed by Debian is a core principle.Other news
The twenty-third issue of the miscellaneous news for developers has been released and covers the following topics:New Developers and Maintainers
Six applicants have been accepted as Debian Maintainers since the previous issue of the Debian Project News. Please welcome Michael Ziegler, Josué Miguel Abarca Samayoa, Manuel A. Fernandez Montecelo, Tomasz Muras, Praveen Arimbrathodiyil, and Youhei SASAKI into our project!
Release-critical bugs statistics for the upcoming release
According to the unofficial release-critical bug counter, the upcoming release, Debian 6.0 "Squeeze", is currently affected by 245 release-critical bugs. Ignoring bugs which are easily solved or on the way to being solved, roughly speaking, about 145 release-critical bugs remain to be solved for the release to happen.
DebConf10: beta versions of the recordings are up
published on Sun Aug 8 21:59:00 2010 in debconf-news
For your enjoyment and enlightment, 85 videos in low and high encoding quality are available at the usual location already, which I think is totally superimpressive, even though the videos are relased as betas (or maybe alphas?) - so you might find issues. We will continue to work on them the next days and^w^w weeks, if you’re on the team you can use the reviewing interface in penta like you did in NYC. More information about the work still to be done should be available on our mailing list in a few days…
As previously said, please leave a thanks-message in our wiki. We truely love to hear your stories, where, what, how and why you watched our videos and how you benefit from our work. Your feedback is truely very important to us!
It is important to leave your thanks mesaage on the wiki, as our team consisted of about 40 wonderful people this year, so if you “just” say thanks to a few members, your message will not be as powerful and motivating as it could be :-)
So much for now, big thanks to everyone who help make DebConf10 a wonderful experience and great conference! You rock!
DebConf10: please say thank you to the whole team
published on Fri Aug 6 19:29:00 2010 in debconf-news
If you appreciate the videoteams work, please leave a message in our wiki. We truely love to her your stories, where, what, how and why you watched our videos and how you benefit from our work. Your feedback is truely very important to us! :-)
Participate remotely with your Web Browser
published on Tue Aug 3 16:39:00 2010 in debconf-news
Thanks to Valessio Brito you can also participate on many sessions by simply opening http://debianart.org/live/ in your browser. You’ll see a stream, the schedule, identi.ca and twitter posts and can join the irc channels used to comment / discussion during the sessions.
You’ll either need a HTML5 compliant Web Browser or java.