------------------------------------------------------------------------ The Debian Project http://www.debian.org/ Debian Project News [email protected] September 8th, 2010 http://debian.org/News/weekly/2010/11/ ------------------------------------------------------------------------
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 * Bits from the Debian Women project * DebConf10 DPL report * Backports service becoming official * Updated Debian GNU/Linux: 5.0.6 released * Release update * Changelogs for testing available * Debian growth over the releases * Organising the annual Debian Conference * New signing key for the Debian Archive created * ... and much more. Debian Project mourns the loss of Frans Pop ------------------------------------------- The Debian Project lost Frans Pop [1], 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 [2] members [3] of [4] the [5] Debian [6] community [7] already expressed their sadness. The team behind the Debian Project News would like to do so too: Frans, you will be missed! 1 : http://www.debian.org/News/2010/20100831 2 : http://blog.einval.com/2010/08/31#Frans_Pop 3 : http://lists.debian.org/[email protected] 4 : http://lists.debian.org/[email protected] 5 : http://grep.be/blog/en/life/fjp 6 : http://amayita.livejournal.com/195915.html 7 : http://www.itp.tuwien.ac.at/~mattems/blog/2010/09/01#fjp Bits from the Debian Women project ---------------------------------- The Debian Women project [8] 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. 8 : http://women.debian.org The Mentoring Program [9] allows men and women who want to contribute to Debian, but aren't sure where or how to start, to get some help with their first steps. 9 : http://women.debian.org/mentoring/ There have been at least 38 women that have contributed in packaging software for Debian, and there are currently 11 female Debian Developers and 1 Debian Maintainer. The group would like to raise those numbers to 50 packagers by the end of 2011, and 20 Debian Developers by the end of 2012. There are also some other interesting statistics [10] about the current female participation in Debian. 10 : http://wiki.debian.org/DebianWomen/Statistics The project is also interested in getting more women to translate debconf templates or package descriptions and contribute to the release notes, as well as participate in any other areas of the Debian project. In order to do this, we will be holding some IRC training sessions [11] in the near future, in order to help people get started. We are currently making the list of subjects and trainers, we'll publish more news about this once the first sessions are scheduled. 11 : http://wiki.debian.org/DebianWomen/TrainingSessions For more information you can join the IRC channel #debian-women on irc.oftc.net, or subscribe to the debian-women mailing list [12]. If you are a Spanish speaker, you can also join the #debian-mujeres IRC channel on irc.oftc.net. 12 : http://lists.debian.org/debian-women DebConf10 DPL report -------------------- The Debian Project Leader (DPL), Stefano Zacchiroli, provided a report after the recent DebConf in New York City [13]. 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) [14] which has prizes! 13 : http://lists.debian.org/[email protected] 14 : http://wiki.debconf.org/wiki/DebConf10/RCBC#RC_Bug_Squashing_Contest In addition to those subjects he also added some details on Debian Derivatives, the relationship between DebConf and Debian, and on init systems. As always, a wealth of important information from the DPL. Backports service becoming official ----------------------------------- The backports.org [15], offering updated packages from Debian's testing branch for Debian's stable (and oldstable) releases, has now been integrated as an official Debian service [16] available from backports.debian.org [17] 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 [18]. The backports team [19] also published some information for package maintainers [20]. 15 : http://www.backports.org/ 16 : http://www.debian.org/News/2010/20100905 17 : http://backports.debian.org/ 18 : http://backports.debian.org/Instructions/ 19 : http://wiki.debian.org/Teams/Backports 20 : http://lists.debian.org/[email protected] Updated Debian GNU/Linux: 5.0.6 released ---------------------------------------- A new update release for Debian GNU/Linux 5.0 [21] "Lenny" has been released. All recent security updates have been added as well as some fixes for critical issues. The linux-2.6 [22] package was also updated for increased hardware support. New CD and DVD images as well as update CDs and DVDs will be available soon. 21 : http://www.debian.org/News/2010/20100904 22 : http://packages.debian.org/linux-2.6 Release update -------------- A new release update [23] 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 therelease-notes pseudo-package, while new and noteworthy things [24] 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. 23 : http://lists.debian.org/[email protected] 24 : http://wiki.debian.org/NewInSqueeze Changelogs for testing available -------------------------------- Jörg Jaspert announced a new service for users of Debian's "testing" branch: thechangelogs of packages migrated to the testing branch [25] 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 thedists/testing directory, and are rotated on a daily basis, being kept about two days. There's also always a symlink to the latest one [26]. 25 : http://blog.ganneff.de/cgi-bin/movabletype/mt-tb.cgi/308 26 : http://ftp.debian.org/debian/dists/testing/ChangeLog 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 [27]. To his astonishment Debian's "unstable" branch has grown from about 20,000 packages to over 30,000 within three years! 27 : http://blog.orebokech.com/2010/08/update-on-md5sums-and-debian-growth.html He also calculated the growth rate of the releases, and estimates that with the upcoming Debian 6.0 "Squeeze" about 29,000 packages will be released, which is a growth compared to Debian 5.0 "Lenny" of 29.6%. 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? [28]", "The DebConf selection process [29]", "How DebConf manages money [30]", "DebConf budgeting for a single conference [31]", "The DebConf registration process [32]", and "DebConf Fund-raising [33]". 28 : http://debian-administration.org/users/rkd/weblog/3 29 : http://debian-administration.org/users/rkd/weblog/4 30 : http://debian-administration.org/users/rkd/weblog/5 31 : http://debian-administration.org/users/rkd/weblog/6 32 : http://debian-administration.org/users/rkd/weblog/7 33 : http://debian-administration.org/users/rkd/weblog/8 New signing key for the Debian Archive created ---------------------------------------------- FTP-Master Jörg Jaspert announced details of the new signing key for the Debian archive [34]. The new key has already been added to the debian-archive-keyring [35] 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. 34 : http://lists.debian.org/[email protected] 35 : http://packages.debian.org/debian-archive-keyring Other news ---------- Following the "unofficial" bits from the ARM porters mentioned in last issue, Hector Oron postedofficial bits [36]. 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. 36 : http://lists.debian.org/20100826105951.gb20...@enorme Colin Watson called for help debugging a GRUB2 [37] problem with some Windows applications. Apparently some proprietary software overwrites some parts of GRUB to store some licensing information. Colin asks affected users for some data and gave instructions on how to obtain it. 37 : http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/ucgi/~cjwatson/blosxom/2010/08/28#2010-08-28-windows-applications-making-grub2-unbootable Robert Millan announced the availability of experimental Debian Installer images with ZFS support [38]. 38 : http://robertmh.wordpress.com/2010/09/06/debian-installer-with-zfs/ The Emdebian Team released Emdebian Grip 1.0.1 [39], which is a binary compatible distribution with smaller packages (e.g. with documentation stripped) based upon Debian 5.0.6, targeting embedded devices. 39 : http://www.linux.codehelp.co.uk/serendipity/index.php?/archives/212-Emdebian-Grip-updated.html Christian Perrier was pleased to find out that for Debian 6.0 "Squeeze" six languages [40] might be able to achieve the goal of having 100% of debconf messages translated: Swedish, Russian, French, German, Portuguese, and Czech [41]. For Debian 5.0 "Lenny" only French and German made the 100%. 40 : http://www.perrier.eu.org/weblog/2010/09/02#100percent-squeeze 41 : http://www.debian.org/intl/l10n/po-debconf/rank New Debian Contributors ----------------------- 7 applicants have been accepted [42] as Debian Maintainer and 6 people started to maintain packages [43] 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! 42 : http://lists.debian.org/[email protected] 43 : http://udd.debian.org/cgi-bin/new-maintainers.cgi 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 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. 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/#2010-35 46 : http://wiki.debian.org/ProjectNews/RC-Stats Important Debian Security Advisories ------------------------------------ Debian's Security Team recently released advisories for these packages (among others): phpmyadmin [47], typo3-src [48], OpenOffice.org [49], openssl [50], wireshark [51], barnowl [52], smbind [53], quagga [54], and freetype [55]. Please read them carefully and take the proper measures. 47 : http://www.debian.org/security/2010/dsa-2097 48 : http://www.debian.org/security/2010/dsa-2098 49 : http://www.debian.org/security/2010/dsa-2099 50 : http://www.debian.org/security/2010/dsa-2100 51 : http://www.debian.org/security/2010/dsa-2101 52 : http://www.debian.org/security/2010/dsa-2102 53 : http://www.debian.org/security/2010/dsa-2103 54 : http://www.debian.org/security/2010/dsa-2104 55 : http://www.debian.org/security/2010/dsa-2105 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 [56] for announcements. 56 : http://lists.debian.org/debian-security-announce/ New and noteworthy packages --------------------------- The following packages were added to the unstable Debian archive recently (among others [57]): 57 : http://packages.debian.org/unstable/main/newpkg * ejabberd-mod-shared-roster-ldap -- shared roster via LDAP for ejabberd [58] * fai-setup-storage -- automatically prepare storage devices [59] * openttd-openmsx -- free music set for use with the OpenTTD game [60] * sugar-turtleart-activity -- LOGO-like tool for teaching programming - Sugar activity [61] * system-config-printer-udev -- utilities to detect and configure printers automatically [62] * turtleart -- LOGO-like tool for teaching programming [63] Please note that due to the freeze of the upcoming Debian 6.0 [64] "Squeeze" acceptance of new packages has almost ceased. 58 : http://packages.debian.org/unstable/main/ejabberd-mod-shared-roster-ldap 59 : http://packages.debian.org/unstable/main/fai-setup-storage 60 : http://packages.debian.org/unstable/main/openttd-openmsx 61 : http://packages.debian.org/unstable/main/sugar-turtleart-activity 62 : http://packages.debian.org/unstable/main/system-config-printer-udev 63 : http://packages.debian.org/unstable/main/turtleart 64 : http://www.debian.org/News/2010/20100806 Work-needing packages --------------------- Currently 564 packages are orphaned and 133 packages are up for adoption. Please take a look at the recent [65] reports [66] to see if there are packages you are interested in or view the complete list of packages which need your help [67]. 65 : http://lists.debian.org/[email protected] 66 : http://lists.debian.org/[email protected] 67 : 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 [68] to find out how to help. We're looking forward to receiving your mail at [email protected] [69]. 68 : http://wiki.debian.org/ProjectNews/HowToContribute 69 : mailto:[email protected] This issue of Debian Project News was edited by Margarita Manterola, Jeremiah C. Foster and Alexander Reichle-Schmehl [70]. 70 : mailto:[email protected] -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [email protected] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? 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