------------------------------------------------------------------------ The Debian Project http://www.debian.org/ Debian Project News debian-public...@lists.debian.org April 18th, 2011 http://www.debian.org/News/weekly/2011/06/ ------------------------------------------------------------------------
Welcome to this year's sixth issue of DPN, the newsletter for the Debian community. Topics covered in this issue include: * Bits from the Release Team -- Kicking off "Wheezy" * Registration now open for DebConf11 and call for contributions * Report from the FTP Master meeting * The Canterbury Project: an amazing example of cross-distro collaboration * Report from Med@Tel * Further interviews * Other news * New Debian Contributors * Important Debian Security Advisories * New and noteworthy packages * Work-needing packages * Want to continue reading DPN? Bits from the Release Team -- Kicking off "Wheezy" -------------------------------------------------- Neil McGovern sent some bits from the Release Team [1] calling for feedback on the recent release. He also addresses various subjects that are currently under discussion: time-based freezes, transitions, release goals, sprint organisation and 0-day NMU policy. 1 : http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2011/03/msg00016.html Luk Claes proposed (amongst other ideas) continuing the removal of obsolete libraries [2]. Josselin Mouette suggested starting [3] with HAL [4] and gnome-vfs [5]. Although there has been some progress towards getting rid of HAL (still used by xserver-xorg [6] on kFreeBSD), Cyril Brulebois pointed out that this effort is stalled for now [7]. Christian Perrier also proposed to drop [8]defoma [9]. 2 : http://lists.debian.org/debian-release/2011/03/msg00492.html 3 : http://lists.debian.org/debian-release/2011/03/msg00493.html 4 : http://packages.debian.org/src:hal 5 : http://packages.debian.org/src:gnome-vfs 6 : http://packages.debian.org/xserver-xorg 7 : http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2011/03/msg01194.html 8 : http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2011/03/msg01166.html 9 : http://packages.debian.org/defoma Limitations [10] in ifupdown [11] led to calls for an overhaul [12] of Debian's default network management infrastructure. network-manager [13] could be adopted [14] to this end, though this proposal has provoked a great many objections, whether rational [15] or less so [16]. 10 : http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2011/03/msg01146.html 11 : http://packages.debian.org/ifupdown 12 : http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2011/03/msg01167.html 13 : http://packages.debian.org/network-manager 14 : http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2011/04/msg00041.html 15 : http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2011/04/msg00051.html 16 : http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2011/04/msg00120.html Among other release goal proposals [17] (such as read-only root file system and C.UTF-8 provided by default), Roger Leigh started a discussion about supporting [18]/run for "Wheezy" . 17 : http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2011/03/msg01136.html 18 : http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2011/03/msg01118.html Stefano Zacchiroli proposed some further release goals [19] relating to package quality, and relaunched the time based freezes [20] proposal. He argued that fixed freeze dates would allow Debian's developer base to improve planning and coordination with upstream developers, and underlined that the first part of the "Squeeze" freeze (blocking library transitions while being lax about general migration of new packages) was quite successful, and that it should be done similarly in the future. While the time frame for such freezes (andhow they should be announced [21]) is still being discussed, there generally seems to be a consensus in favour [22]. 19 : http://lists.debian.org/debian-release/2011/03/msg00510.html 20 : http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2011/04/msg00091.html 21 : http://lists.debian.org/20110404070550.gl21...@rivendell.home.ouaza.com 22 : http://lists.debian.org/20110407160009.ga25...@upsilon.cc Registration now open for DebConf11 and call for contributions -------------------------------------------------------------- Gunnar Wolf announced the opening of DebConf11 registration [23]. Registration instructions [24] are available and the deadline for sponsored food and accommodation is 8 May 2011. A call for contributions [25] has also been sent, and the organisers welcome all sort of submissions: performances, art installations, debates, or anything else can be proposed as well as traditional talks. There will be a poster session this year. More information on submissions of events or posters is available on the DebConf11 website [26] and the deadline for submissions is also 8 May 2011. 23 : http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2011/04/msg00005.html 24 : http://debconf11.debconf.org/register.xhtml 25 : http://www.debian.org/News/2011/20110408 26 : http://debconf11.debconf.org/cfp.xhtml Report from the FTP Master meeting ---------------------------------- Jörg Jaspert sent a report from the FTP Master meeting [27] which was held at Linux Hotel in Essen, 21--27 March. During the meeting a lot of work was done, in various areas: 27 : http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2011/03/msg00015.html * an upgrade of the main archive machine (as well as backports and security machines) to "Squeeze" was performed; * the update frequency of the DD accessible copy of thedak installation (moved from merkel.debian.org to ries.debian.org) was changed to reflect the database changes immediately * a new field (Built-Using) was implemented in dak and a related patch for dpkg [28] has been prepared * the creation of theMaintainers and Uploaders files was sped up (from roughly 15 minutes to about a minute) * the project of enabling autosigning for the buildds has finally been completed * binary-alldists files were added Meanwhile, in a discussion with the Debian GNU/Hurd porters it was decided that the Hurd port will stay on ftp-master.debian.org until "Wheezy" is released, while the alpha port will be completely removed from Debian and the hppa port will move over todebian-ports.org. As a side note, Jörg added that during the meeting Ansgar Burchardt was appointed to the post of FTP Assistant; congratulations, Ansgar! 28 : http://packages.debian.org/dpkg The Canterbury Project: an amazing example of cross-distro collaboration ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Gerfried Fuchs blogged from behind the scenes of one of the most hilarious -- and well orchestrated -- April Fools' pranks of this year: the Canterbury Project [29]. As you probably noticed, on the morning of April the first, the homepages of Arch Linux, Debian, Gentoo, Grml and OpenSUSE were replaced by a placeholder [30] announcing the merging of all these distributions into one new one. In the posting, Gerfried said that the initial idea was to simply do a sort of exchange of homepages between participants. "Then the thing happened which the Free Software community is so well known for: additional ideas came in, two people independently addressed me whether it wouldn't be better that instead of a circle replacement of the frontpage, why not display the same page on all of them. And one of them added that a corresponding news item might make sense." said Gerfried. Another example of new ideas coming up during the whole Canterbury Project was the introduction of thecant package manager [31] (see also Alexander's blog for details [32]). Gerfried revealed also the reason behind the name "Canterbury" : it was adopted when Alexander Reichle-Schmehl noticed that, according to the relevantWikipedia page [33], "the earliest recorded association between April 1 and foolishness can be found in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales (1392)". As a final note, Gerfried added that even if the all-in-one distribution was only a joke, the cross-distro collaboration was real and exciting, and thanked all the participants for their efforts. 29 : http://rhonda.deb.at/blog/debian/the-canterbury-project.html 30 : http://www.debian.org/misc/canterbury 31 : http://packages.debian.org/cant 32 : http://blog.schmehl.info/Debian/cant-package-manager 33 : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/April_Fools%27_Day Report from Med@Tel ------------------- Andreas Tille sent a report from the Med@Tel conference [34] held in Luxembourg and dedicated to medicine informatics. This year, Andreas delivered a talk titled [35] "Benefits of Free/Libre Open Source Software in Health Care (FLOSS-HC): Communities, Collaboration, Development Issues, Technology Transfer", based on a paper written by the Debian Med team. As Andreas reported, the talk was well received and the main impression is that the Debian Med Blend itself is considered as a really helpful and needed thing. It also seems that Debian Med and other important -- and very useful -- Blends are little known by the wider public. For this reason, Andreas proposed to use microblogging to better promote the existence of Debian Med and -- in the following thread -- many other ways to improve the visibility of Debian Blends [36]. 34 : http://lists.debian.org/debian-project/2011/04/msg00024.html 35 : http://people.debian.org/~tille/talks/201104_luxembourg 36 : http://lists.debian.org/debian-project/2011/04/msg00032.html Further interviews ------------------ Since the last issue of the Debian Project News, two new issues of the [37] "This week in Debian" podcast have been published: with Jonathan Nadeau [38], about current Debian news; and with Roberto Sanchez [39], who gave a talk at the Northeast GNU/Linux Fest. 37 : http://wiki.debian.org/ThisWeekInDebian 38 : http://frostbitemedia.libsyn.com/this-week-in-debian-episode-24 39 : http://frostbitemedia.libsyn.com/this-week-in-debian-episode-25 There have also been two further "People behind Debian" interviews: withBdale Garbee [40], chair of the technical committee; and with Adam D. Barratt [41], release manager. 40 : http://raphaelhertzog.com/2011/03/28/people-behind-debian-bdale-garbee-chair-of-the-technical-committee/ 41 : http://raphaelhertzog.com/2011/04/07/people-behind-debian-adam-d-barratt-release-manager/ Other news ---------- Steve McIntyre made available online a new cdimage search tool [42] that has knowledge of just about all the Debian CDs and DVDs produced by Debian since the Woody release, covering all the official releases (both older archived releases and the current "stable" release) and the current sets of daily and weekly testing builds. 42 : http://cdimage-search.debian.org Stefano Zacchiroli has just been reelected as Debian Project Leader [43], supported by 98% of valid voters. Congratulations, and keep up the good work! 43 : http://www.debian.org/vote/2011/vote_001 Guido Günther sent some bits from the fourth Debian Groupware Meeting [44], held at the Linux Hotel in Essen, Germany. During the weekend the group has fixed various issues (mostly related to gnome-shell [45] in iceowl [46]), and has been able to push new versions of icedove [47] and iceowl [48] to "unstable" and to resurrect theiceowl-l10n [49] language packs. Some work was also done on Citadel [50], Z-Push and SOGo. 44 : http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2011/04/msg00003.html 45 : http://packages.debian.org/gnome-shell 46 : http://packages.debian.org/iceowl 47 : http://packages.debian.org/icedove 48 : http://packages.debian.org/iceowl 49 : http://packages.debian.org/iceowl-l10n 50 : http://packages.debian.org/src:citadel Raj Mathur sent a report about a large Debian installation in India [51]: the installation involved about 2,500 desktops and 40 servers, on which were installed "Squeeze" and "Wheezy" . The installation was done in six different locations in India for a large call-out business headquartered in Noida, Uttar Pradesh. Well done! 51 : http://www.mail-archive.com/ilugd@lists.linux-delhi.org/msg28166.html Cyril Brulebois published the eighth [52], ninth [53] and tenth [54] issues of his Debian XSF News. 52 : http://blog.ikibiki.org/2011/04/03/DXN-8/ 53 : http://blog.ikibiki.org/2011/04/10/DXN-9/ 54 : http://blog.ikibiki.org/2011/04/11/DXN-10/ Raphaël Hertzog blogged about his "journey of a new GNOME 3 Debian packager [55]" . 55 : http://raphaelhertzog.com/2011/04/11/journey-of-a-new-gnome-3-debian-packager/ New Debian Contributors ----------------------- Seven applicants [56] have been accepted as Debian Maintainers since the previous issue of the Debian Project News. Please welcome Pau Garcia i Quiles, Andrew O. Shadoura, Ignace Mouzannar, Hans-Christoph Steiner, Timo Juhani Lindfors, Jaromir Mikes, and Asias He into our project! 56 : http://lists.debian.org/debian-project/2011/04/msg00004.html Important Debian Security Advisories ------------------------------------ Debian's Security Team recently released advisories for these packages (among others): gdm3 [57], mahara [58], tomcat5.5 [59], bind9 [60], tgt [61], tiff [62], vlc [63], tmux [64], x11-xserver-utils [65], ikiwiki [66], gitolite [67], isc-dhcp [68], dhcp3 [69], and vlc [70]. Please read them carefully and take the proper measures. 57 : http://www.debian.org/security/2011/dsa-2205 58 : http://www.debian.org/security/2011/dsa-2206 59 : http://www.debian.org/security/2011/dsa-2207 60 : http://www.debian.org/security/2011/dsa-2208 61 : http://www.debian.org/security/2011/dsa-2209 62 : http://www.debian.org/security/2011/dsa-2210 63 : http://www.debian.org/security/2011/dsa-2211 64 : http://www.debian.org/security/2011/dsa-2212 65 : http://www.debian.org/security/2011/dsa-2213 66 : http://www.debian.org/security/2011/dsa-2214 67 : http://www.debian.org/security/2011/dsa-2215 68 : http://www.debian.org/security/2011/dsa-2216 69 : http://www.debian.org/security/2011/dsa-2217 70 : http://www.debian.org/security/2011/dsa-2218 Debian's Backports Team released advisories for these packages: iceweasel [71], nss [72], squid3 [73], and tmux [74]. Please read them carefully and take the proper measures. 71 : http://lists.debian.org/debian-backports-announce/2011/03/msg00002.html 72 : http://lists.debian.org/debian-backports-announce/2011/03/msg00003.html 73 : http://lists.debian.org/debian-backports-announce/2011/04/msg00000.html 74 : http://lists.debian.org/debian-backports-announce/2011/04/msg00001.html 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 [75] (and the separate backports list [76], and stable updates list [77] or volatile list [78], for "Lenny" , the oldstable distribution) for announcements. 75 : http://lists.debian.org/debian-security-announce/ 76 : http://lists.debian.org/debian-backports-announce/ 77 : http://lists.debian.org/debian-stable-announce/ 78 : http://lists.debian.org/debian-volatile-announce/ New and noteworthy packages --------------------------- 1244 packages were added to the unstable Debian archive recently. Among many others [79] are: 79 : http://packages.debian.org/unstable/main/newpkg * 4store -- RDF database storage and query engine [80] * biogenesis -- artificial life program that simulates evolution of organisms [81] * brewtarget -- GUI beer brewing software [82] * clam-networkeditor -- prototyping tool for CLAM [83] * cliquer -- clique searching program [84] * commit-patch -- utility to commit fine grained patches to source code control repositories [85] * cpan-listchanges -- package change history notification tool [86] * cpanminus -- script to get, unpack, build and install modules from CPAN [87] * ctioga2 -- polymorphic plotting program [88] * daisy-player -- player for DAISY Digital Talking Books [89] * darnwdl -- WDL document format viewer [90] * downtimed -- monitor of downtime, shutdown, and crashes [91] * facturlinex2 -- ERP/CRM for small and medium businesses [92] * fadecut -- toolset to rip audiostreams, cut, fade in/out and tag the resulting audiofiles [93] * fcitx-config-gtk -- graphic fcitx configuration tool [94] * florence -- extensible and scalable virtual keyboard for GNOME [95] * gaduhistory -- EKG history viewer [96] * gem2deb -- Debian Ruby packaging suite [97] * get-flash-videos -- program to download Flash videos [98] * haci -- web based IP(v6) address and network administration tool [99] * hydra -- very fast network login cracker [100] * ipxe -- PXE boot firmware [101] * jstest-gtk -- joystick testing and configuration tool [102] * laditools -- set of tools to control and monitor LADI (JACK+LASH) system [103] * logtop -- real time log line rate analyzer [104] * npm -- package manager for node.js [105] * openafs-fuse -- AFS distributed file system experimental FUSE client [106] * oxref -- cross reference utility [107] * photofilmstrip -- slide show creator with Ken Burns effect [108] * pnp4nagios -- Nagios addon to create graphs from performance data [109] * psensor -- display graphs for monitoring hardware temperature [110] * qmail -- secure, reliable, efficient, simple message transfer agent [111] * scolasync -- graphic tool to copy data to or from a set of USB storage media [112] * scute -- OpenPGP smartcard plugin for Mozilla Network Security Services [113] * ssl-cert-check -- proactively handling X.509 certificate expiration [114] * sslstrip -- SSL/TLS man-in-the-middle attack tool [115] * starman -- high-performance preforking PSGI/Plack web server [116] * synapse -- semantic file launcher [117] * twms -- tiny web map service [118] 80 : http://packages.debian.org/unstable/main/4store 81 : http://packages.debian.org/unstable/main/biogenesis 82 : http://packages.debian.org/unstable/main/brewtarget 83 : http://packages.debian.org/unstable/main/clam-networkeditor 84 : http://packages.debian.org/unstable/main/cliquer 85 : http://packages.debian.org/unstable/main/commit-patch 86 : http://packages.debian.org/unstable/main/cpan-listchanges 87 : http://packages.debian.org/unstable/main/cpanminus 88 : http://packages.debian.org/unstable/main/ctioga2 89 : http://packages.debian.org/unstable/main/daisy-player 90 : http://packages.debian.org/unstable/main/darnwdl 91 : http://packages.debian.org/unstable/main/downtimed 92 : http://packages.debian.org/unstable/main/facturlinex2 93 : http://packages.debian.org/unstable/main/fadecut 94 : http://packages.debian.org/unstable/main/fcitx-config-gtk 95 : http://packages.debian.org/unstable/main/florence 96 : http://packages.debian.org/unstable/main/gaduhistory 97 : http://packages.debian.org/unstable/main/gem2deb 98 : http://packages.debian.org/unstable/main/get-flash-videos 99 : http://packages.debian.org/unstable/main/haci 100 : http://packages.debian.org/unstable/main/hydra 101 : http://packages.debian.org/unstable/main/ipxe 102 : http://packages.debian.org/unstable/main/jstest-gtk 103 : http://packages.debian.org/unstable/main/laditools 104 : http://packages.debian.org/unstable/main/logtop 105 : http://packages.debian.org/unstable/main/npm 106 : http://packages.debian.org/unstable/main/openafs-fuse 107 : http://packages.debian.org/unstable/main/oxref 108 : http://packages.debian.org/unstable/main/photofilmstrip 109 : http://packages.debian.org/unstable/main/pnp4nagios 110 : http://packages.debian.org/unstable/main/psensor 111 : http://packages.debian.org/unstable/main/qmail 112 : http://packages.debian.org/unstable/main/scolasync 113 : http://packages.debian.org/unstable/main/scute 114 : http://packages.debian.org/unstable/main/ssl-cert-check 115 : http://packages.debian.org/unstable/main/sslstrip 116 : http://packages.debian.org/unstable/main/starman 117 : http://packages.debian.org/unstable/main/synapse 118 : http://packages.debian.org/unstable/main/twms Work-needing packages --------------------- Currently 314 packages are orphaned [119] and 154 packages are up for adoption [120]: please visit the complete list of packages which need your help [121]. 119 : http://www.debian.org/devel/wnpp/orphaned 120 : http://www.debian.org/devel/wnpp/rfa 121 : 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 [122] to find out how to help. We're looking forward to receiving your mail at debian-public...@lists.debian.org [123]. 122 : http://wiki.debian.org/ProjectNews/HowToContribute 123 : mailto:debian-public...@lists.debian.org This issue of Debian Project News was edited by Francesca Ciceri, David Prévot and Alexander Reichle-Schmehl [124]. 124 : 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/20110418184759.gd12...@melusine.alphascorpii.net
