------------------------------------------------------------------------ The Debian Project http://www.debian.org/ Debian Project News [email protected] August 26th, 2010 http://debian.org/News/weekly/2010/10/ ------------------------------------------------------------------------
Welcome to this year's tenth issue of DPN, the newsletter for the Debian community. Topics covered in this issue include: * Debian turns 17 * Screenshots atpackages.debian.org * Some bits from ARM porters * Join the DebConf Team * Progress of the Debian GNU/kFreeBSD port * Bits from the MIA team * ... and much more. Debian turns 17 --------------- The seventeenth birthday of the Debian Project caused quite [1] some [2] media [3] echo [4], birthday parties [5] and congratulations [6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20]. 1 : http://www.tecchannel.de/pc_mobile/news/2030272/debian_wird_17_jahre_alt/ 2 : http://www.itwire.com/opinion-and-analysis/open-sauce/41241-how-to-thank-debian-for-17-great-years 3 : http://www.dobreprogramy.pl/Debian-ma-juz-lat,Aktualnosc,19930.html 4 : http://www.marlexsystems.org/debian-festeja-17-anos-de-existencia/11374/ 5 : http://wiki.debian.org/DebianDay2010 6 : http://www.markshuttleworth.com/archives/478 7 : http://jonathancarter.org/2010/08/16/happy-birthday-debian-2/ 8 : http://news.debian.net/ 9 : http://blog.venthur.de/2010/08/16/happy-birthday-debian/ 10 : http://digitizor.com/2010/08/16/happy-17th-birthday-debian-and-some-interesting-history/ 11 : http://www.stormos.org/node/2327 12 : http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/debian-26/happy-17th-birthday-debian-826722/ 13 : http://www.linux.com/community/blogs/happy-17th-birthday-debian.html 14 : http://lists.debian.org/[email protected] 15 : http://www.lucas-nussbaum.net/blog/?p=541 16 : http://andrew.mcmillan.net.nz/blog/thank_you_debian 17 : http://www.itoperationz.com/2010/08/happy-birthday-debian/ 18 : http://blog.irwan.name/?p=1520 19 : http://insidesocal.com/click/2010/08/happy-belated-birthday-debian.html 20 : http://upsilon.cc/~zack/blog/posts/2010/08/happy_birthday_debian/ As a surprise present for most Debian contributors, Maintainers and Developers, users were asked to submit their thanks via the website thanks.debian.net [21], and birthday balloons pointing to that page were added to several of Debian's web services. 21 : http://thanks.debian.net About 3000 submissions [22] were received, ranging from plain "Thanks" in various forms, up toheartwarming [23] messages in (to most of us) foreign languages [24]. We would like to thank all users for their feedback, which really strengthened our project's morale and motivation! Thanks! 22 : http://thank.debian.net/read_thanks 23 : http://www.marga.com.ar/blog/index.cgi/debian/Debian_Appreciation_Day_Recap.html 24 : http://thank.debian.net/message/136 As an unrelated sidenote, the editor would also like to mention that Debian's bug submission tool [25]reportbug supports a --kudos option, making it easy to submit thanks to package maintainers on the other 364 days of the year ;). 25 : http://bugs.debian.org/reportbug 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 [26]screenshots.debian.net service into the package information at [27]packages.debian.org. See for example the screenshot of the package extremetuxracer [28]. 26 : http://screenshots.debian.net 27 : http://packages.debian.org 28 : http://packages.debian.org/sid/extremetuxracer For packages that do not yet have a screenshot available, a placeholder image is shown. Users are encouraged to contribute by uploading their own screenshots for their favourite applications. Some bits from ARM porters -------------------------- Riku Voipio published some "unofficial bits from the ARM porters [29]" 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 [30] packages, non-free packages and packages from [31]backports.org are now automatically built as well. Finally, he announced some work being done on a Hardfloat ARM port [32], which will work better on newer ARM processors with a hardware floating-point unit. 29 : http://suihkulokki.blogspot.com/2010/08/unnofficial-bits-from-arm-porters.html 30 : http://www.debian.org/volatile/ 31 : http://www.backports.org/ 32 : http://lists.debian.org/debian-arm/2010/08/msg00008.html Join the DebConf Team --------------------- Richard Darst started a series of blog posts about the organisation of the annual Debian Conference [33] 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 theDebConf team mailing list [34] and joining the #debconf-team IRC channel on irc.debian.org. In his second post [35], he explained the timeline of a DebConf. 33 : http://debian-administration.org/users/rkd/weblog/1 34 : http://lists.debconf.org/mailman/listinfo/debconf-team 35 : http://debian-administration.org/users/rkd/weblog/2 Progress of the Debian GNU/kFreeBSD port ---------------------------------------- Different aspects of the port of the Debian operating system to the FreeBSD kernel [36] have made great progress recently. The Debian installer has been upgraded [37] 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 [38] scripts used to create CD and DVD images now support the creation of the new architectures [39]. 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 tofix the web and wiki pages [40]. 36 : http://www.debian.org/ports/kfreebsd-gnu/ 37 : http://lists.debian.org/[email protected] 38 : http://packages.debian.org/debian-cd 39 : http://blog.einval.com/2010/08/20#kfreebsd_cds 40 : http://lists.debian.org/[email protected] Bits from the MIA team ---------------------- Jan Hauke Rahm sent some bits from the MIA team [41], 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. 41 : http://lists.debian.org/[email protected] Other news ---------- Valessio Brito wondered [42] 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. 42 : http://lists.debian.org/[email protected] Martin Zobel-Helas noted [43] that now more than 50% of Debian's hosts and public services are reachable over IPv6. 43 : http://lists.debian.org/[email protected] Release-critical bugs statistics for the upcoming release --------------------------------------------------------- According to the unofficial release-critical bug counter [44], 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. 44 : http://bts.turmzimmer.net/details.php There are also more detailed statistics [45] as well as some hints on how to interpret [46] these numbers. 45 : http://blog.schmehl.info/Debian/rc-stats/#2010-33 46 : http://wiki.debian.org/ProjectNews/RC-Stats Important Debian Security Advisories ------------------------------------ Debian's Security Team recently released advisories for these packages (among others): squirrelmail [47], lxr-cvs [48], smarty (update) [49], ghostscript [50], Linux 2.6.26 [51], lvm2 [52], and zope-ldapuserfolder [53]. Please read them carefully and take the proper measures. 47 : http://www.debian.org/security/2010/dsa-2091 48 : http://www.debian.org/security/2010/dsa-2092 49 : http://www.debian.org/security/2010/dsa-1919 50 : http://www.debian.org/security/2010/dsa-2093 51 : http://www.debian.org/security/2010/dsa-2094 52 : http://www.debian.org/security/2010/dsa-2095 53 : http://www.debian.org/security/2010/dsa-2096 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 security mailing list [54] for announcements. 54 : http://lists.debian.org/debian-security-announce/ New and noteworthy packages --------------------------- The following packages were added to the unstable Debian archive recently (among others [55]): 55 : http://packages.debian.org/unstable/main/newpkg * 3depict -- visualisation and analysis for single valued point data [56] * bluedevil -- KDE Bluetooth stack [57] * eatmydata -- library and utilities designed to disable fsync and friends [58] * font-manager -- font management application for the GNOME desktop [59] * freetts -- speech synthesis system [60] * gitit -- wiki engine backed by a Git or Darcs filestore [61] * luakit -- fast and small web browser extensible by Lua [62] * mpris-remote -- command-line interface for MPRIS compatible media players [63] * mricron -- magnetic resonance image conversion, viewing and analysis [64] * phoneui-apps -- SHR applications [65] * spectacle -- RPM Spec file generator and management tool [66] * stackapplet -- panel applet to track reputation on StackExchange sites [67] * wordpress-shibboleth -- Shibboleth plugin for WordPress [68] 56 : http://packages.debian.org/unstable/main/3depict 57 : http://packages.debian.org/unstable/main/bluedevil 58 : http://packages.debian.org/unstable/main/eatmydata 59 : http://packages.debian.org/unstable/main/font-manager 60 : http://packages.debian.org/unstable/main/freetts 61 : http://packages.debian.org/unstable/main/gitit 62 : http://packages.debian.org/unstable/main/luakit 63 : http://packages.debian.org/unstable/main/mpris-remote 64 : http://packages.debian.org/unstable/main/mricron 65 : http://packages.debian.org/unstable/main/phoneui-apps 66 : http://packages.debian.org/unstable/main/spectacle 67 : http://packages.debian.org/unstable/main/stackapplet 68 : http://packages.debian.org/unstable/main/wordpress-shibboleth Work-needing packages --------------------- Currently 576 packages are orphaned and 135 packages are up for adoption. Please take a look at the recent [69] reports [70] to see if there are packages you are interested in or view the complete list of packages which need your help [71]. 69 : http://lists.debian.org/[email protected] 70 : http://lists.debian.org/[email protected] 71 : 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 contributing page [72] to find out how to help. We're looking forward to receiving your mail at [email protected] [73]. 72 : http://wiki.debian.org/ProjectNews/HowToContribute 73 : mailto:[email protected] This issue of Debian Project News was edited by Jeremiah C. Foster and Alexander Reichle-Schmehl [74]. 74 : mailto:[email protected] -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [email protected] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? 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