------------------------------------------------------------------------ The Debian Project http://www.debian.org/ Debian Project News [email protected] October 4th, 2010 http://debian.org/News/weekly/2010/13/ ------------------------------------------------------------------------
Welcome to this year's thirteenth issue of DPN, the newsletter for the Debian community. Topics covered in this issue include: * Constantly Usable Testing (CUT) update * Bits from the FTP Team * Report about this year's "Google Summer of Code" * Bits from the Publicity Team * ... and much more. An update on Constantly Usable Testing (CUT) -------------------------------------------- Raphaël Hertzog wrote a detailed article on the recent activity surrounding the Constantly Usable Testing (CUT) proposal [1]. 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. 1 : http://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/406301/e28612e7adae5653/ A quote from the article: "The global proposal is certainly appealing: it would address the concerns of obsolescence of Debian's stable release by making intermediary releases. Anyone needing something more recent for hardware support can start by installing a CUT and follow the subsequent releases until the next stable version. And users who always want the latest version of all software could use rolling after having installed a CUT." CUT seems to represent an innovative evolution of Debian distributions. While it holds much promise, it is a lot of work especially since there is already so much work getting a stable release actually released. There always seems to be a tension between having a rock solid stable release, which many people rely on Debian to provide, and a developer's toolkit with cutting edge programming languages and libraries. Perhaps CUT can address this. Please see also the current discussion on the CUT team mailing list [2]. 2 : http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/cut-team/2010-September/000152.html 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. He also announced that "starting with "Squeeze" , the volatile suite will be integrated into the normalftp.debian.org mirror tree. This weekend we enabled squeeze-volatile on ftp-master and setup the needed scripts so that the volatile team can fill it with packages whenever needed. Please note that the general handling of volatile starting with "Squeeze" is now different to the way volatile worked in the past. All packages now have to pass "stable" 'sproposed-updates queue before going into volatile." Jörg went on to discuss a number of important topics - his mail is quite detailed and has lots of valuable information [3] - including the discussion of using a version control system to "push" entire repositories to theftp-master host. 3 : http://lists.debian.org/[email protected] Report about this year's "Google Summer of Code" ------------------------------------------------ Obey Arthur Liu wrote a report about Debian's participation in this year's [4] "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. 4 : http://lists.debian.org/[email protected] The projects ranged from "Hurd port and de-Linux-isation of Debian-Installer" through "debbugs bug reporting and manipulation API" and "Aptitude Qt" up to "Debian-Installer on Neo FreeRunner and handheld devices" . You can find more details inthe Debian wiki [5]. 5 : http://wiki.debian.org/gsoc Bits from the Publicity Team ---------------------------- Debian's Publicity Team posted some bits [6] 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 officialidenti.ca account [7], or being available for a This Week in Debian [8] podcast. 6 : http://lists.debian.org/[email protected] 7 : http://identi.ca/debian 8 : http://wiki.debian.org/ThisWeekInDebian Other news ---------- Joey Hess was quite pleased to see some of his tools being referenced in a recent movie [9]. 9 : http://kitenet.net/~joey/blog/entry/MovieOS_credit/ Russell Coker created a package repository for packages fixing SELinux related bugs [10] for Debian "Squeeze". 10 : http://etbe.coker.com.au/2010/09/20/my-squeeze-se-linux-repository/ The PA-RISC (aka [11] "hppa") architecture has been dropped as a release architecture [12] for Debian 6.0 "Squeeze". It will still be available in Debian's "unstable" suite. 11 : http://www.debian.org/ports/hppa/ 12 : http://lists.debian.org/1285100542.20782.1123.ca...@kaa.jungle.aubergine.my-net-space.net Thomas Lange announced [13] the FAI project (Fully Automated Install) has received its own domain name at fai-project.org [14] and all services (wiki, repositories) have been migrated to use the new domain. 13 : http://news.debian.net/2010/09/28/fai-home-has-moved/ 14 : http://fai-project.org/ Release Assistant Mehdi Dogguy announced the agenda of the past weekend meeting of the Release Team [15]. One point on their agenda: "Check the state of Squeeze". 15 : http://lists.debian.org/[email protected] Continuing his blogs about how the annual Debian Conference is organised, Richards Darst recently covered the topics The DebConf travel sponsorship process [16] and How DebCamp relates to DebConf [17]. Joey Hess gave some historical background in his DebCamp origin story [18]. 16 : http://www.debian-administration.org/users/rkd/weblog/10 17 : http://www.debian-administration.org/users/rkd/weblog/9 18 : http://kitenet.net/~joey/blog/entry/DebCamp_origin_story/ Luca Bruno posted a report from the Debian/Ubuntu Community Conference, ITA 2010 [19]. As this was the first Italian event organised by both communities, he highlights: "This new kind of collaboration between our communities was found to be really positive and more events have already been drafted for the next year, including a translation sprint and a contributors meeting." 19 : http://kaeso.wordpress.com/2010/09/21/report-from-the-debianubuntu-community-conference-ita-2010/ Holger Levsen announced the availability of the first release candidate of an updated Debian Edu Lenny [20] version. One of the most important features is an update of the installer based upon the debian-installer used in Debian 5.0.6 "Lenny" adding newer hardware support. 20 : http://lists.debian.org/[email protected] New Debian Contributors ----------------------- 3 people started to maintain packages [21] since the previous issue of the Debian Project News. Please welcome Dimitrios Eftaxiopoulos, Pierre-Louis Bonicoli, and Hector Romojaro into our project! 21 : http://udd.debian.org/cgi-bin/new-maintainers.cgi Release-critical bugs statistics for the upcoming release --------------------------------------------------------- According to the Bugs Search interface of the Ultimate Debian Database [22], 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. 22 : http://udd.debian.org/bugs.cgi There are also more detailed statistics [23] as well as some hints on how to interpret [24] these numbers. 23 : http://blog.schmehl.info/Debian/rc-stats/#2010-39 24 : http://wiki.debian.org/ProjectNews/RC-Stats These statistics have recently been moved to a new data source, and are not comparable with the statistics of the last issue. Please read Alexander's blog [25] for more details. 25 : http://blog.schmehl.info/2010/09/24#2010-38-2 Important Debian Security Advisories ------------------------------------ Debian's Security Team recently released advisories for these packages (among others): git-core [26], moodle [27]. Please read them carefully and take the proper measures. 26 : http://www.debian.org/security/2010/dsa-2114 27 : http://www.debian.org/security/2010/dsa-2115 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 [28] for announcements. 28 : http://lists.debian.org/debian-security-announce/ New and noteworthy packages --------------------------- The following packages were added to the unstable Debian archive recently (among others [29]): 29 : http://packages.debian.org/unstable/main/newpkg * dkopp -- full and incremental backup to DVD [30] * input-pad -- on-screen input pad to send characters with mouse [31] * live-manual-html -- Debian Live - documentation (HTML) [32] * live-manual-pdf -- Debian Live - documentation (PDF) [33] * postgresql-9.0 -- object-relational SQL database, version 9.0 server [34] Please note that due to the freeze of the upcoming Debian 6.0 [35] "Squeeze" acceptance of new packages has almost ceased. 30 : http://packages.debian.org/unstable/main/dkopp 31 : http://packages.debian.org/unstable/main/input-pad 32 : http://packages.debian.org/unstable/main/live-manual-html 33 : http://packages.debian.org/unstable/main/live-manual-pdf 34 : http://packages.debian.org/unstable/main/postgresql-9.0 35 : http://www.debian.org/News/2010/20100806 Work-needing packages --------------------- Currently 492 packages are orphaned and 129 packages are up for adoption. Please take a look at the recent [36] reports [37] to see if there are packages you are interested in or view the complete list of packages which need your help [38]. 36 : http://lists.debian.org/[email protected] 37 : http://lists.debian.org/[email protected] 38 : 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 [39] to find out how to help. We're looking forward to receiving your mail at [email protected] [40]. 39 : http://wiki.debian.org/ProjectNews/HowToContribute 40 : mailto:[email protected] This issue of Debian Project News was edited by Jeremiah C. Foster and Alexander Reichle-Schmehl [41]. 41 : mailto:[email protected] -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [email protected] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [email protected] Archive: http://lists.debian.org/[email protected]
