------------------------------------------------------------------------ The Debian Project http://www.debian.org/ Debian Project News debian-public...@lists.debian.org January 14th, 2011 http://www.debian.org/News/weekly/2011/01/ ------------------------------------------------------------------------
Welcome to this year's first issue of DPN, the newsletter for the Debian community. Topics covered in this issue include: * "Squeeze" Deep Freeze * Debian Installer 6.0 RC1 release * Debian 6.0 "Squeeze" to be released with completely free Linux kernel * Machine-readable format for debian/copyright files * Bits from the Debian Project Leader * Further documentation on Emdebian: components and filters * Two new Debian Women tutorials * Further "This week in Debian" interviews * ... and much more. "Squeeze" Deep Freeze --------------------- Neil McGovern writes in an recent email [1]: "Following the plan outlined in theprevious release update [2], we are now in deep freeze, which means that we'll only be migrating to testing packages that fix RC bugs." A deep freeze is one of the last phases before a release of Debian. There is lots of bug fixing and documentation still to do and you can help. Check out theNew in [3] "Squeeze" page for example; and if you find bugs in the installer help report and even fix them. 1 : http://lists.debian.org/20101213202220.gf3...@halon.org.uk 2 : http://lists.debian.org/20101114192542.gc3...@halon.org.uk 3 : http://wiki.debian.org/NewInSqueeze Debian Installer 6.0 RC1 release -------------------------------- The first release candidate of the installer for Debian Squeeze was released on January 12 [4]. Many fixes are included in this release of the installer, along with new improvements: better OS and partition detection, new supported hardware, etc. 4 : http://www.debian.org/News/2011/20110113 The errata [5] collects details and a full list of known issues. You are encouraged to test the installer and report bugs; media and further information are available on the Debian Installer pages [6]. 5 : http://www.debian.org/devel/debian-installer/errata 6 : http://www.debian.org/devel/debian-installer Debian 6.0 "Squeeze" to be released with completely free Linux kernel --------------------------------------------------------------------- As the Debian project announced, the upcoming stable release Debian 6.0 "Squeeze" will be shipped with acompletely free Linux kernel [7] - thus achieving a long term goal which was already set for Debian 4.0 "Etch" and 5.0" Lenny" . Thanks to the work of theDebian Kernel team [8] and various upstream Linux developers, non-free firmware files have been split off; instead of being integral parts of the kernel, these files may now be shipped separately and loaded at runtime if needed. This provides a free system to those who wish to have one, while allowing those who need the non-free firmware files still to use them. 7 : http://www.debian.org/News/2010/20101215 8 : http://wiki.debian.org/DebianKernel Steve McIntyre, lead of Debian's CD team, added that unofficial CD images [9] have been created, containing non-free but distributable firmware files, while USB-installations have already supported loading additional firmware files for some time. More details can be found in the Debian wiki [10]. 9 : http://blog.einval.com/2010/12/15#CDs_with_firmware 10 : http://wiki.debian.org/Firmware Debian Project leader Stefano Zacchiroli also blogged a bit about the background of the changes [11]. 11 : http://upsilon.cc/~zack/blog/posts/2010/12/squeeze_your_non-free_firmware_away/ Machine-readable format for debian/copyright files -------------------------------------------------- Lars Wirzenius announced [12] that Debian Enhancement Proposal 5, specifying a machine-readable format for the copyright information of a Debian package [13], has reached "candidate" status, meaning that discussion about the format has been settled and no major changes are expected anymore: it is ready to be used. 12 : http://lists.debian.org/1294581615.20273.71.ca...@havelock.lan 13 : - Debian's policy [14] mandates that Debian software packages must come with copyright information of the source code used, but no specific format is mandated. Most packages come with a freeform text file, making it hard to process this information automatically. 14 : http://www.debian.org/doc/debian-policy/ Bits from the Debian Project Leader ----------------------------------- Debian Project Leader Stefano Zacchiroli sent new bits from the DPL [15]. Besides mentioning various talks and interviews he gave, he announced a new contact point for participants at Debian events: antiharassm...@debian.org [16]. An anti-harassment policy for Debian sprints (based upon a draft for such a policy for DebConf [17]) is about to follow soon. 15 : http://lists.debian.org/20101224144600.ga...@upsilon.cc 16 : mailto:antiharassm...@debian.org 17 : http://wiki.debconf.org/wiki/StandardsOfRespect He also mentioned that he had approved two sprints, one for the Web Team (which has already been taken place) and one for the Security Team (which is forthcoming), as well as several cross-distribution collaboration activities, such as organizing a cross-distro face to face meeting to discuss the topic of integrating third party applications [18] on top of FOSS distributions, à la Software Center/App Store. 18 : http://lists.debian.org/20101223084135.gb15...@upsilon.cc Further documentation on Emdebian: components and filters --------------------------------------------------------- Continuing his intermittent series on Emdebian, Neil Williams described Emdebian's concepts of components and filters [19]. As the package data files of Debian's main distribution have become too large to be sanely handled on embedded systems, Emdebian Grip therefore subdivides Debian's main repository to minimize cached data, so that systems not using any Java components (for instance) don't need to download and cache metadata for Java-related packages. Neil also explained in detail further filtering techniques used by Emdebian. 19 : http://www.linux.codehelp.co.uk/serendipity/index.php?/archives/218-Documenting-Emdebian-components-and-filters.html Two new Debian Women tutorials ------------------------------ The Debian Women project published two new tutorials. In the first tutorial Gerfried Fuchs gave an introduction to Debian's bug tracking system [20], including explanation of the different tags and usage of package version information by the bug tracking system. In the second tutorial, Enrico Zini introduced the various information sources about Debian packages [21], ranging from data available through Debian's package repositories, over debtags and various package tracking tools to the package tracking system. 20 : http://wiki.debian.org/HowtoUseBTS 21 : http://wiki.debian.org/DebianPackageInformation Further "This week in Debian" interviews ---------------------------------------- Since the last issue of the Debian Project News, five new issues of the [22] "This week in Debian" podcast have been published: with Asheesh Laroia [23], member of the Debian Mentor Community; with Dave Yates [24], host of the Lotta Linux Links Podcast [25]; with George Castro [26], discussing Ubuntu as a Debian derivative; with Jonathan Nadeau [27], about the latest Debian news, and the upcoming release of "Squeeze" ; and withRhonda [28], member of Debian's Webmaster Team, discussing the updated Debian Website, due for the release of "Squeeze" . 22 : http://wiki.debian.org/ThisWeekInDebian 23 : http://frostbitemedia.libsyn.com/this-week-in-debian-episode-11 24 : http://frostbitemedia.libsyn.com/this-week-in-debian-episode-12 25 : http://lottalinuxlinks.com/podcast/ 26 : http://frostbitemedia.libsyn.com/this-week-in-debian-episode-13 27 : http://frostbitemedia.libsyn.com/this-week-in-debian-episode-14 28 : http://frostbitemedia.libsyn.com/this-week-in-debian-episode-15 There have also been two new "people behind Debian" interviews: withMehdi Dogguy [29], who became a member of Debian's Release team barely a year after first becoming a Debian Developer, and with David Kalnischkies [30], one of the developers of APT, Debian's package management system. In the spirit of these interviews, there has also been a "reverse people behind Debian [31]" interview withRaphaël Hertzog [32]. 29 : http://raphaelhertzog.com/2010/12/23/people-behind-debian-mehdi-dogguy-release-assistant/ 30 : http://raphaelhertzog.com/2010/12/10/people-behind-debian-david-kalnischkies-an-apt-developer/ 31 : http://raphaelhertzog.com/2010/12/04/go2linux-interviewed-me-the-biggest-problem-of-debian/ 32 : http://www.go2linux.org/linux/2010/12/interview-debian-developer-rapha-l-hertzog-ubuntu-beneficial-debian-853 Other news ---------- Luca Capello announced that the annual general meeting [33] of debian.ch [34], the official representation of the Debian project in Switzerland and in the Principality of Liechtenstein, will take place on January 31 in Aareheim in the center of Bern. 33 : http://lists.debian.org/87pqsb78np....@gismo.pca.it 34 : http://debian.ch/ Sjoerd Simons asked for help [35] in PulseAudio Debian packaging [36]. 35 : http://sjoerd.luon.net/posts/2010/12/pkg_pulseaudio_needs_you/ 36 : https://alioth.debian.org/projects/pkg-pulseaudio/ Richard Darst reported about the successful first Debian-NYC Novice Night [37], which is a meeting for everyone who would like to install or configure Debian for their own needs. The next session will probably be in January or February [38]; some planning hints [39] are also in place. 37 : http://debian-administration.org/users/rkd/weblog/12 38 : http://wiki.debian.org/DebianNYC/NoviceNights 39 : http://wiki.debian.org/DebianNYC/NoviceNights/Planning Alexander Wirt reported on his blog that six new mailing lists are now available on lists.debian.org [40]: 40 : http://blog.snow-crash.org/2010/12/new-debian-mailinglists.html * debian-gis [41] * debian-dug-in [42] * debian-user-tamil [43] * debian-l10n-vietnamese [44] * debian-l10n-indonesian [45] * debian-stable-announce [46] Kumar Appaiah noted [47] that the Duck Duck Go search engine [48] has set up some shortcuts (the so-called !bangs) for searching in various Debian sites: !dpkg goes to packages.debian.org [49], !dpts goes to packages.qa.debian.org [50], and !dbugs goes to bugs.debian.org [51]. 41 : http://lists.debian.org/debian-gis 42 : http://lists.debian.org/debian-dug-in 43 : http://lists.debian.org/debian-user-tamil 44 : http://lists.debian.org/debian-l10n-vietnamese 45 : http://lists.debian.org/debian-l10n-indonesian 46 : http://lists.debian.org/debian-stable-announce 47 : http://www.debian-administration.org/users/kumanna/weblog/13 48 : http://duckduckgo.com/ 49 : http://packages.debian.org/ 50 : http://packages.qa.debian.org 51 : http://bugs.debian.org/ Sandro Tosi mentioned on his blog that bts-link has a new home [52]. Several weeks ago, in fact, bts-link [53] was migrated from merkel.debian.org to busoni.debian.org. 52 : http://sandrotosi.blogspot.com/2010/12/bts-link-has-new-home.html 53 : http://bts-link.alioth.debian.org/ Christian Perrier noticed that German and French localization reached 100% for po-debconf [54]. Russian, Swedish, Portuguese, and Czech localization may also be able to make it, while Spanish probably won't this time. 54 : http://www.perrier.eu.org/weblog/2010/12/21#german-french-100percent-squeeze Stefano Zacchiroli collected various existing pieces of documentation in order to answer the question "how to contribute to Debian? [55]" , and pointed to theofficial contribution page of the website [56], and its equivalent on the wiki [57] and in the FAQ [58]. He also highlighted less documented "cultural" aspects of Debian technical life such as coordination over IRC or interacting with package maintainers via the BTS. 55 : http://upsilon.cc/~zack/blog/posts/2010/12/how_to_contribute_to_Debian/ 56 : http://www.debian.org/intro/help 57 : http://wiki.debian.org/HelpDebian 58 : http://www.debian.org/doc/FAQ/ch-contributing.en.html Raphael Geissert announced [59] the [60] "Debian Automated Code Analysis" (DACA) project, which runs various source code quality tools over all Debian source packages available. 59 : http://lists.debian.org/201012161200.31008.geiss...@debian.org 60 : http://qa.debian.org/daca/ New Debian Contributors ----------------------- 5 applicants have been accepted [61] as Debian Developers, 1 applicant has been accepted [62] as Debian Maintainer, and 12 people have started to maintain packages [63] since the previous issue of the Debian Project News. Please welcome Didier Raboud, Benjamin Drung, Kåre Thor Olsen, Scott James Remnant, Jerome Marant, Gregor Jasny, Gildardo Adrian Maravilla Jacome, Cristian Henzel, Colin Darie, Anton Gladky, Lukas Gaertner, Yask Gupta, Michael Lustfield, Pjotr Prins, Monica Ramirez Arceda, Tim Weippert, Milan Kupcevic, and Sven Eckelmann into our project! 61 : https://nm.debian.org/nmlist.php#newmaint 62 : http://lists.debian.org/e1puryr-0000ag...@franck.debian.org 63 : http://udd.debian.org/cgi-bin/new-maintainers.cgi It is our special pleasure to welcome Kåre Thor Olsen, who is our first official non-packaging Debian Developer [64]! 64 : http://www.debian.org/vote/2010/vote_002 Release-critical bugs statistics for the upcoming release --------------------------------------------------------- According to the Bugs Search interface of the Ultimate Debian Database [65], the upcoming release, Debian 6.0 "Squeeze", is currently affected by 46 release-critical bugs. Ignoring bugs which are easily solved or on the way to being solved, roughly speaking, about 20 release-critical bugs remain to be solved for the release to happen. 65 : http://udd.debian.org/bugs.cgi There are also more detailed statistics [66] as well as some hints on how to interpret [67] these numbers. 66 : http://blog.schmehl.info/Debian/rc-stats/#2011-02 67 : http://wiki.debian.org/ProjectNews/RC-Stats Important Debian Security Advisories ------------------------------------ Debian's Security Team recently released advisories for these packages (among others): exim4 [68]; bind9 [69]; xulrunner [70]; collectd [71]; xpdf [72]; tor [73]; libxml2 [74]; wordpress [75]; phpmyadmin [76]; libapache2-mod-fcgid [77]; openssl, nss, apache2, and lighttpd [78]; dpkg [79]; glibc [80] (updated advisory); and mysql-dfsg-5.0 [81]. Please read them carefully and take the proper measures. 68 : http://www.debian.org/security/2010/dsa-2131 69 : http://www.debian.org/security/2010/dsa-2130 70 : http://www.debian.org/security/2010/dsa-2132 71 : http://www.debian.org/security/2010/dsa-2133 72 : http://www.debian.org/security/2010/dsa-2135 73 : http://www.debian.org/security/2010/dsa-2136 74 : http://www.debian.org/security/2010/dsa-2137 75 : http://www.debian.org/security/2010/dsa-2138 76 : http://www.debian.org/security/2010/dsa-2139 77 : http://www.debian.org/security/2011/dsa-2140 78 : http://www.debian.org/security/2011/dsa-2141 79 : http://www.debian.org/security/2011/dsa-2142 80 : http://www.debian.org/security/2011/dsa-2122 81 : http://www.debian.org/security/2011/dsa-2143 Debian's Backports Team released advisories for these packages: tor [82], iceweasel [83], wordpress [84], exim4 [85], and subversion [86]. Please read them carefully and take the proper measures. 82 : http://lists.debian.org/20101222074418.gh8...@anguilla.noreply.org 83 : http://lists.debian.org/20110102194528.gb5...@glandium.org 84 : http://lists.debian.org/20101213101706.889441a9...@taggart.lackof.org 85 : http://lists.debian.org/20110106142003.gd1...@downhill.g.la 86 : http://lists.debian.org/4d2b21c5.7050...@elego.de 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 [87] (and the separate backports list [88] and volatile list [89]) for announcements. 87 : http://lists.debian.org/debian-security-announce/ 88 : http://lists.debian.org/debian-backports-announce/ 89 : http://lists.debian.org/debian-volatile-announce New and noteworthy packages --------------------------- The following packages were added to the unstable Debian archive recently (among others [90]): 90 : http://packages.debian.org/unstable/main/newpkg * clzip -- data compressor based on the LZMA algorithm (C version) [91] * debian-reference-pt -- Debian system administration guide, Portuguese translation [92] * gjacktransport -- access to the JACK's transport mechanism as touchable slider [93] * ir-keytable -- alter keymaps of remote controller devices [94] * k8temp -- AMD K8 thermal diode reader for BSD system [95] * nginx-full -- small, but very powerful and efficient web server and mail proxy [96] * nginx-light -- small, but very powerful and efficient web server - light [97] * nodau -- simple console based note taking program [98] * plzip -- parallel data compressor based on the LZMA algorithm [99] * pyppd -- CUPS PostScript Printer Description's compressor and generator [100] * surf -- simple web browser [101] * telepathy-ring -- GSM and 3G UMTS Telepathy connection manager [102] * transgui -- front-end to remotely control Transmission [103] * whyteboard -- overlay painting and annotation application [104] * wraplinux -- utility to wrap a Linux kernel and initrd into an ELF or NBI file [105] * xul-ext-quickproxy -- statusbar button to turn the proxy on and off with a single click [106] * zita-at1 -- JACK autotuner [107] * zutils -- utilities for dealing with compressed files transparently [108] Please note that due to the freeze of the upcoming Debian 6.0 [109] "Squeeze" acceptance of new packages has almost ceased. 91 : http://packages.debian.org/unstable/main/clzip 92 : http://packages.debian.org/unstable/main/debian-reference-pt 93 : http://packages.debian.org/unstable/main/gjacktransport 94 : http://packages.debian.org/unstable/main/ir-keytable 95 : http://packages.debian.org/unstable/main/k8temp 96 : http://packages.debian.org/unstable/main/nginx-full 97 : http://packages.debian.org/unstable/main/nginx-light 98 : http://packages.debian.org/unstable/main/nodau 99 : http://packages.debian.org/unstable/main/plzip 100 : http://packages.debian.org/unstable/main/pyppd 101 : http://packages.debian.org/unstable/main/surf 102 : http://packages.debian.org/unstable/main/telepathy-ring 103 : http://packages.debian.org/unstable/main/transgui 104 : http://packages.debian.org/unstable/main/whyteboard 105 : http://packages.debian.org/unstable/main/wraplinux 106 : http://packages.debian.org/unstable/main/xul-ext-quickproxy 107 : http://packages.debian.org/unstable/main/zita-at1 108 : http://packages.debian.org/unstable/main/zutils 109 : http://www.debian.org/News/2010/20100806 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 [110] to find out how to help. We're looking forward to receiving your mail at debian-public...@lists.debian.org [111]. 110 : http://wiki.debian.org/ProjectNews/HowToContribute 111 : mailto:debian-public...@lists.debian.org This issue of Debian Project News was edited by Francesca Ciceri, Jeremiah Foster, David Prévot and Alexander Reichle-Schmehl [112]. 112 : mailto:debian-public...@lists.debian.org -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-news-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/20110114162143.gd30...@melusine.alphascorpii.net
