--------------------------------------------------------------------------- Debian Project News http://www.debian.org/News/project/2009/01/ Debian Project News - January 12th, 2009 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Welcome to this year's 1st issue of DPN, the newsletter for the Debian community. This issue is dedicated to [1]Thiemo Seufer, who died on 26 December 2008 in a tragic car accident. 1: http://www.debian.org/News/2008/20081229 Topics covered in this issue include: * Bits from the Debian CD team * Bits from the Debian Installer team * Results from the "Lenny release GR" Bits from the Debian CD team Frans Pop sent [2]Bits from the Debian CD team, summarizing various changes affecting the installation media for the upcoming release of Debian GNU/Linux 5.0 "Lenny". The most notable change is the replacement of the Xfce installation disc with a "light desktop" installation disc for installing Xfce or LXDE. Furthermore, all four major desktop environments (GNOME, KDE, Xfce and LXDE) are directly installable from the first DVD image; the desktop environment to be installed can now be chosen via the boot menu. 2: http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2009/01/msg00002.html The Debian CD team still plans to create the following images: * Architecture-specific images: + businesscard CD + network install (netinst) CD + full CD (650 MB) images - users can now choose between: o standard CD set, which will by default install GNOME o special KDE CD o special light desktop environments CD (LXDE + Xfce) + DVD set + Blu-ray image (only as jigdo files for i386, amd64 and source) * Multi-architecture images: + alpha/hppa/ia64 network install CD + i386/amd64/powerpc network install CD + i386/amd64 DVD; also includes source packages Bits from the Debian Installer team Christian Perrier [3]sent bits from the Debian Installer team. With the upcoming release of Debian GNU/Linux 5.0 "Lenny" in mind, he summarized the improvements made during this release cycle, including (but not limited to) support for loading firmware during installation, SATA RAID support, early upgrade of packages for security fixes, support for "volatile", a new boot menu for i386/amd64, and support for installation from Windows through win32-loader. 3: http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2008/12/msg00013.html He also mentioned that the next release candidate version is intended to be the version used in the Lenny official release. This version will fix a few bugs discovered in Release Candidate 1 (RC1) and a few more which were listed in RC1 errata. The team intends to begin the final release process of Debian Installer RC2 in the very early days of January 2009. He also stresses the need for new blood to join the Debian Installer team after Lenny has been released, since out of the 180 people with commit access only three have been active in the coordination list and IRC channel during the last three months. Results from the "Lenny release GR" Bdale Garbee [4]posted the results of the [5]"Lenny release GR", a general resolution about the handling of firmware issues and similar bugs affecting Debian GNU/Linux 5.0 "Lenny". 4: http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2009/01/msg00000.html 5: http://www.debian.org/vote/2008/vote_003 From all the proposed options, the one titled "Assume blobs comply with GPL unless proven otherwise" won. With this outcome, the Debian project now assumes that "source less" firmware (rather small programs that internally control various electronic devices, see [6]Wikipedias Page about Firmware) has been created the way it is (without a source in a higher level programming language) and therefore fullfils the requirements of the GNU General Public License. New maintainer for search.debian.org needed [7]Thomas Viehmann is [8]seeking a new maintainer for [9]search.debian.org. The search engine is a slightly patched xapian-omega instance. You should be a Debian Developer or be willing to be part of a team for access to the installation. Some more improvements to the language support are desirable, which involve some C++, but Thomas would try to help out there. 7: mailto:[email protected] 8: http://lists.debian.org/debian-project/2009/01/msg00024.html 9: http://search.debian.org Security support for next testing (Squeeze) The Testing Security Team [10]announced that security support for the next Debian testing (codenamed "Squeeze") will not begin immediately after the release of Lenny as stable. Users of Debian testing who need security support should stay with Lenny until the beginning of security support for Squeeze is announced. 10: http://lists.debian.org/debian-testing-security-announce/2008/12/msg00019.html Internationalization support for planet.debian.org Jörg Jaspert [11]announced that [12]planet.debian.org, a service collecting the personal blogs of various Debian Developers, Maintainers and other Debian-associated people, is now capable of hosting web pages and RSS/Atom-feeds in different languages, as demonstrated by the [13]Spanish Planet Debian. 11: http://blog.ganneff.de/blog/2008/12/21/planet-i18n.html 12: http://planet.debian.org 13: http://planet.debian.org/es/ Adding a new language is quite simple but requires at least ten feeds to be added for the newly created language. Personnel change of the Debian Secretary Due to criticism while conducting the recent "Lenny release GR" vote, Manoj Srivastava, long term secretary of the Debian Project, decided to [14]resign from this position. Following his resignation many developers have thanked him for his work. 14: http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2008/12/msg00765.html Debian Project Leader Steve McIntyre is now [15]searching for volunteers for this position, while Bdale Garbee, current Chairman of the Technical Committee, is now [16]serving as Acting Secretary. 15: http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2008/12/msg00011.html 16: http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2008/12/msg00801.html Personnel changes in Debian's Technical Committee After being member of Debian's Technical Committee for three years, Anthony Towns [17]resigned from that position to get fresh blood into the committee. We would like to thank Anthony for the work he has done over the past years. 17: http://lists.debian.org/debian-ctte/2009/01/msg00006.html Bdale Garbee, current chair of the Technical Committee, [18]announced that Russ Allbery and Don Armstrong have been added to the technical committee. Please join us in congratulating them on achieving this level of recognition and trust within our community. 18: http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2009/01/msg00003.html Personnel changes in the New Maintainer front desk Christoph Berg [19]announced some personnel changes in the New Maintainer front desk, handling applications of people interested in becoming Debian Developers. Marc Brockschmidt, who has been a member since 2005, has resigned from this position, while Bernd Zeimetz has joined the team. 19: http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2008/12/msg00010.html We would like to thank Marc for his long term dedication. Other news The 12th issue of the [20]miscellaneous news for developers has been released and covers the following topics: * Bdale Garbee as Acting Secretary * New proposal to track maintenance status of all packages * Packages-arch-specific maintenance changes * Githubredir available * Babelbox updated for Lenny 20: http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2008/12/msg00009.html Holger Levsen [21]called for help to record the sessions to be held in Debian's Developer Room at the upcoming Free and Open Source Developer Europe Meeting (FOSDEM). 21: http://lists.debian.org/debian-events-eu/2009/01/msg00002.html Simon McVittie wrote a small [22]HOWTO about "converting Debian packaging from bzr to git". 22: http://smcv.pseudorandom.co.uk/2009/01/08_debian_bzr_to_git/ Nagarjuna G. [23]launched a [24]service drawing graphs representing dependency information for Debian packages, such as [25]python and [26]emacs21. 23: http://gnowgi.org/2008/12/16/debian-dependency-map/ 24: http://www.gnowledge.org/search_debmap?val=1 25: http://www.gnowledge.org/debmap_view?objid=python 26: http://www.gnowledge.org/debmap_view?objid=emacs21 Ana Beatriz Guerrero Lopez [27]proposed looking at bug reports you reported and updating their status as a new year's resolution, and gave a brief explanation on how to do so. She also proposed helping the maintainers of your favourite package with their bugs. 27: http://ekaia.org/blog/2009/01/01/new-years-proposal-look-at-your-reported-bugs/ Luk Claes and Ralf Treinen are looking for some help with [28]GPG Key Signing Coordination, a service primarily aimed at prospective contributors, finding existing Debian developers who can sign their key for the ID part of the NM maintainer process. It's not much work; a description of the tasks can be found [29]in their Subversion repository. 28: http://nm.debian.org/gpg.php 29: http://svn.debian.org/wsvn/nm/trunk/doc/gpg-coord/README?op=file&rev=0&sc=0 Daniel Burrows [30]created some diagrams about the APT system and applications using it. 30: http://algebraicthunk.net/~dburrows/blog/entry/apt-system-diagram/ New Developers and Maintainer Three applicants have been [31]accepted as Debian Developers and one applicant has been [32]accepted as Debian Maintainer since the previous issue of the Debian Project News. Please welcome Michael Casadevall, Arthur Loiret, Jelmer Vernooij and Tiago Bortoletto Vaz into our project! 31: http://lists.debian.org/debian-newmaint/2009/01/msg00009.html 32: http://lists.debian.org/debian-project/2008/12/msg00086.html Release-critical bugs statistics for the upcoming release According to the [33]unofficial RC-bugs count, the upcoming release Debian GNU/Linux 5.0 "Lenny" is currently affected by 99 release critical bugs. 26 of them have already been fixed in Debian's "unstable" branch. Of the remaining 73 release critical bugs, 15 already have a patch (which might need testing) and 12 are marked as pending. Ignoring these bugs as well as release critical bugs for packages in contrib or non-free, 49 release critical bugs remain to be solved for the release to happen. 33: http://bts.turmzimmer.net/details.php Important Debian Security Advisories Debian's Security Team recently released advisories for these packages (among others): [34]courier-authlib, [35]proftpd-dfsg, [36]avahi, [37]moodle, [38]phppgadmin, [39]xterm, [40]ruby1.8 and ruby1.9, [41]icedove, [42]iceape and [43]gforge. Please read them carefully and take the proper measures. 34: http://www.debian.org/security/2008/dsa-1688 35: http://www.debian.org/security/2008/dsa-1689 36: http://www.debian.org/security/2008/dsa-1690 37: http://www.debian.org/security/2008/dsa-1691 38: http://www.debian.org/security/2008/dsa-1693 39: http://www.debian.org/security/2009/dsa-1694 40: http://www.debian.org/security/2009/dsa-1695 41: http://www.debian.org/security/2009/dsa-1696 42: http://www.debian.org/security/2009/dsa-1697 43: http://www.debian.org/security/2009/dsa-1698 Please note that these are a selection of the more important security advisories of the last weeks. If you need to be kept up to date about security advisories released by the Debian Security Team, please subscribe to the [44]security mailing list for announcements. 44: http://lists.debian.org/debian-security-announce/ New and noteworthy packages The following packages were added to the unstable Debian archive recently ([45]among others): * [46]freespeak -- GNOME frontend to online translator engines * [47]giplet -- GNOME IP display applet * [48]hunspell-gl-es -- Galician dictionary for hunspell * [49]iaxclient-tcl -- Tcl interface to the iax2 client lib * [50]iceweasel-downthemall -- iceweasel extension with advanced download capabilities * [51]igal2 -- online image gallery generator * [52]imvirt -- detects several virtualizations * [53]kdm-gdmcompat -- Provide basic gdm functionality to systems running kdm * [54]kio-ftps -- an ftps KIO slave for KDE 4 * [55]kism3d -- 802.11 visualizer for s3d * [56]libapache-mod-security -- Tighten web applications security for Apache * [57]libapache2-mod-authn-sasl -- SASL authentication backend provider for Apache * [58]libcherokee-mod-admin -- Cherokee web server - Administrative plugin * [59]libcherokee-mod-ldap -- Cherokee web server - LDAP user validator plugin * [60]libcherokee-mod-libssl -- Cherokee web server - SSL crypto functions plugin * [61]libcherokee-mod-mysql -- Cherokee web server - MySQL user validator plugin * [62]libcherokee-mod-server-info -- Cherokee web server - Server information plugin * [63]libgoogle-collections-java -- suite of collections and related goodies for Java 5.0 * [64]mandos -- a server giving encrypted passwords to Mandos clients * [65]mandos-client -- do unattended reboots with an encrypted root file system * [66]minisapserver -- Mini SAP Server * [67]performous -- karaoke game that allows user supplied songs * [68]php5-svn -- PHP Bindings for the Subversion Revision control system * [69]pushover -- Fun puzzle game with dominos * [70]qprint -- encoder and decoder for quoted-printable encoding * [71]rtpg-www -- web based front end for rTorrent * [72]s3d -- 3d network display server * [73]subdownloader -- automatically downloads/uploads subtitles for video files * [74]trac-authopenid -- OpenID authentication plugin for Trac * [75]tstools -- set of tools for reporting on and manipulating MPEG data * [76]urlwatch -- tool for monitoring webpages for updates * [77]whohas -- query multiple distributions' package archives * [78]yagtd -- utility to help organize your to-do lists * [79]xdemorse -- GTK+ Morse Code Decoding Software 45: http://packages.debian.org/unstable/main/newpkg 46: http://packages.debian.org/unstable/main/freespeak 47: http://packages.debian.org/unstable/main/giplet 48: http://packages.debian.org/unstable/main/hunspell-gl-es 49: http://packages.debian.org/unstable/main/iaxclient-tcl 50: http://packages.debian.org/unstable/main/iceweasel-downthemall 51: http://packages.debian.org/unstable/main/igal2 52: http://packages.debian.org/unstable/main/imvirt 53: http://packages.debian.org/unstable/main/kdm-gdmcompat 54: http://packages.debian.org/unstable/main/kio-ftps 55: http://packages.debian.org/unstable/main/kism3d 56: http://packages.debian.org/unstable/main/libapache-mod-security 57: http://packages.debian.org/unstable/main/libapache2-mod-authn-sasl 58: http://packages.debian.org/unstable/main/libcherokee-mod-admin 59: http://packages.debian.org/unstable/main/libcherokee-mod-ldap 60: http://packages.debian.org/unstable/main/libcherokee-mod-libssl 61: http://packages.debian.org/unstable/main/libcherokee-mod-mysql 62: http://packages.debian.org/unstable/main/libcherokee-mod-server-info 63: http://packages.debian.org/unstable/main/libgoogle-collections-java 64: http://packages.debian.org/unstable/main/mandos 65: http://packages.debian.org/unstable/main/mandos-client 66: http://packages.debian.org/unstable/main/minisapserver 67: http://packages.debian.org/unstable/main/performous 68: http://packages.debian.org/unstable/main/php5-svn 69: http://packages.debian.org/unstable/main/pushover 70: http://packages.debian.org/unstable/main/qprint 71: http://packages.debian.org/unstable/main/rtpg-www 72: http://packages.debian.org/unstable/main/s3d 73: http://packages.debian.org/unstable/main/subdownloader 74: http://packages.debian.org/unstable/main/trac-authopenid 75: http://packages.debian.org/unstable/main/tstools 76: http://packages.debian.org/unstable/main/urlwatch 77: http://packages.debian.org/unstable/main/whohas 78: http://packages.debian.org/unstable/main/yagtd 79: http://packages.debian.org/unstable/main/xdemorse Debian Package of the Day featured the packages [80]procps (watch: Execute a program at regular intervals and show the output), [81]atool (handling archives without headaches) and [82]tellico (a collection manager for books, videos, music and a whole lot more). 80: http://debaday.debian.net/2008/12/21/watch-from-procps-execute-a-program-at-regular-intervals-and-show-the-output/ 81: http://debaday.debian.net/2008/12/28/atool-handling-archives-without-headaches/ 82: http://debaday.debian.net/2009/01/04/tellico-collection-manager-for-books-videos-music-and-a-whole-lot-more/ Work-needing packages Currently 482 packages are orphaned and 107 packages are up for adoption. Please take a look at [83]the [84]recent [85]reports to see if there are packages you are interested in or view the complete list of [86]packages which need your help. 83: http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2008/12/msg01039.html 84: http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2009/01/msg00016.html 85: http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2009/01/msg00171.html 86: http://www.debian.org/devel/wnpp/help_requested Want to continue reading DPN? Please help us create this newsletter. We still need more volunteer writers to watch the Debian community and report about what is going on. Please see the [87]contributing page to find out how to help. We're looking forward to receiving your mail at [88][email protected]. 87: http://wiki.debian.org/ProjectNews/HowToContribute 88: mailto:[email protected] This issue of Debian Project News was edited by Thomas Viehmann, Paul Wise and Alexander Reichle-Schmehl. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [email protected] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? 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