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The Debian Project https://www.debian.org/
Debian Project News debian-public...@lists.debian.org
December 1, 2014 https://www.debian.org/News/weekly/2014/16/
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Welcome to this year's sixteenth issue of DPN, the newsletter for the
Debian community. Topics covered in this issue include:
* DebConf15 welcomes its first eleven sponsors!
* Debian running on a graphing calculator
* Votes on the General Resolution on init system coupling
* Bits from the Debian Med team
* Freexians third report about Debian Long Term Support
* Newcomer tag in BTS
* FOSS Outreach program for women
* Release Team Sprint Results
* Fun and Sanity in Debian
* Notes on the Cambridge Mini-DebConf
* DebConf14 final report
* Debian Description Translation Project
* How to get new packages into stable
* LiMux Munich Bug Squashing Party
* DPN asks: Hams, What do you do?
* Other news
* New Debian Contributors
* Release-Critical bugs statistics for the upcoming release
* Important Debian Security Advisories
* New and noteworthy packages
* Work-needing packages
* Want to continue reading DPN?
DebConf15 welcomes its first eleven sponsors!
---------------------------------------------
Each year for the past 14 years, Debian has held an annual
conference [1] for developers and users. Next year, DebConf15 [2] will
take place in Heidelberg, Germany in August of 2015. Nine companies had
already committed to sponsoring [3] the event by mid-November, and two
more have joined since: credativ, sipgate, Matanel Foundation, Google,
Fairsight Security, Martin Alfke / Buero 2.0, Ubuntu, Mirantis, Logilab,
Netways, and Hetzner. Should you know of an organisation that would like
to become a sponsor for the event, the DebConf team invites you to
please have a look at the sponsorship brochure [4] which has all of the
details. Looking forward to a great conference!
1: http://debconf.org/
2: http://debconf15.debconf.org/
3: https://bits.debian.org/tag/debconf.html
4:
http://media.debconf.org/dc15/fundraising/debconf15_sponsorship_brochure.pdf
Debian running on a graphing calculator
---------------------------------------
Of interest out on the web was a post from hackaday.com about Debian in
use and running on a graphing calculator [5]. The build was done using
available open-source tools and an ARM emulator then uploaded to the
device. Ivoah of the omnimaga forums shares the details and a how-to in
greater depth along with a video in a blog [6] post.
5: http://hackaday.com/2014/11/18/running-debian-on-a-graphing-calculator/
6: http://codinghobbit.no-ip.org/blog/?p=81
Votes on the General Resolution on init system coupling
-------------------------------------------------------
The Debian Developer community voted [7] and decided that no General
Resolution was needed on init system coupling. The General Resolution
init system coupling vote [8] was proposed in response to a Technical
Committee decision choosing systemd as the default init system for Linux
architectures [9]. Of the 5 available options for voting, option #4
“General Resolution is not required" won the vote [10].
7: https://www.debian.org/vote/2014/vote_003_results.txt
8: https://www.debian.org/vote/2014/vote_003
9: https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=727708#6734
10: https://www.debian.org/vote/2014/vote_003_tally.txt
Bits from the Debian Med team
-----------------------------
The version number of the debian-med metapackages was bumped to 1.99 as
a signal of the plan to release version 2.0 with Jessie. This release
contains for the first time some support for Hospital Information
Systems (HIS).
The team worked hard to enable DFSG free licenses and get packages moved
from non-free into main; they were in continuous discussion with Joe
Felsenstein, the author of PHYLIP, who happily decided to move to a free
license, with PHYLIP being released in September under a BSD-2-
clause [11] license. The team's efforts on license change show that it
is possible to get positive change in licensing that benefits everyone,
and they hope their approach can be used in similar situations.
11: http://evolution.genetics.washington.edu/phylip.html
The team is also involved in a paper which will be at BioMed
Central [12]. The title will be "Community-driven development for
computational biology at Sprints, Hackathons and Codefests".
12: http://www.biomedcentral.com/
Lastly, the Debian Med team will have a Bug Squashing Advent
Calendar [13]. Feel free to join them in their bug squashing effort
where they (and you!) will be closing bugs.
13: http://debian-med.alteholz.de/advent/
Freexians third report about Debian Long Term Support
-----------------------------------------------------
Debian Long Term Support [14] (LTS) is a joint effort of paid
contributors [15] and sponsors to continue the release cycle for
oldstable [16] (Squeeze). The month of October in 2014 had 13.75 hours
allotted across three contributors: Thorsten Alteholz, Raphaël Hertzog,
and Holger Levsen. The effort gained two new sponsors, Daevel [17] and
FOSSter [18], and now has 45.5 hours of paid LTS work to "spend" each
month. Great news and progress but still far from the minimal goal of
funding the equivalent of a half-time position [19]. Should the backlog
grow further, they will look for more paid contributors [20] to share
the workload.
14: https://wiki.debian.org/LTS
15: http://www.freexian.com/services/debian-lts.html
16: https://wiki.debian.org/DebianOldStable
17: http://daevel.fr/
18: http://www.fosster.com/
19: http://www.freexian.com/services/debian-lts.html
20: http://www.freexian.com/services/debian-lts-details.html#join
Overall, the dla-needed.txt file lists 33 packages awaiting an update,
down six from last month. The list of open vulnerabilities in
Squeeze [21] showed about 60 affected packages in total, which is
explained by CVE triaging for Squeeze which had not been done the past
few days, and the POODLE issues with SSLv3 affecting a very large number
of packages.
21: https://security-tracker.debian.org/tracker/status/release/oldstable
It's never too late to join the growing list of sponsors [22]. LTS asks
users and interested parties to please check with their company and
managers to help with the effort via sponsorship. If that is not
possible this year, please consider including this work and the effort
in your budgets for next year.
22: http://www.freexian.com/en/services/debian-lts.html
Newcomer tag in BTS
-------------------
Don Armstrong updates [23] us with a new BTS [24] tag: "newcomer". You
may already be aware of the "gift" tag [25], which has been used for a
while to indicate bugs which are suitable for new contributors to use as
an entry point to working on specific packages. The "newcomer" tag has
been added as a more appropriately named equivalent and has been added
to the BTS documentation.
23: http://www.donarmstrong.com/posts/newcomer_bts_tag/
24: https://www.debian.org/
25: https://wiki.debian.org/qa.debian.org/GiftTag
If you have bugs in your package which you think are ideal for new
contributors to Debian, or you have a package that needs to be fixed,
please tag them "newcomer". If you're getting started in Debian, and
working on bugs to fix, please search [26] for the "newcomer" tag, grab
the helm, and contribute to Debian.
26: https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/pkgreport.cgi?tag=newcomer
FOSS Outreach program for women
-------------------------------
Stefano Zacchiroli and Don Armstrong announced Virginia King and Jingie
Jiang as two of the three intern placements as part of Debian's
participation [27] in the FOSS Outreach Program for women [28].
27: https://wiki.debian.org/OutreachProgramForWomen
28: https://gnome.org/opw/
Starting December 9 through March 9 Virginia will be working on
improving the documentation of the Debian bug tracking system [29], and
Jinjie will be working on Debsources [30]. Welcome aboard!
29: https://bugs.debian.org/
30: http://sources.debian.net/
Release Team Sprint Results
---------------------------
Jonathan Wiltshire updates [31] us with the results of the Release Team
Sprint. Four days after the November 5, 2014 freeze date, they processed
162 unblock requests. Of those, 17 required further information from the
submitters.
31: https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2014/11/msg00005.html
The team is seeking patches and editors for the release notes,
particularly: init system changes; how to choose before upgrading; pros
and cons of upgrading; and the dropping of i486 support.
The codenames have been chosen for the next future releases: Debian 9
"Stretch" and Debian 10 "Buster".
Cyril Brulebois is co-ordinating artwork for Jessie, and expects that it
will be ready before the holiday season. Jessie's artwork is available
for viewing [32], with thanks to all the many contributors who
contributed artwork.
32: https://wiki.debian.org/DebianArt/Themes/Lines
The team asks that you please carry out upgrade tests from Wheezy to
Jessie, and file your experiences against the upgrade-reports pseudo-
package. They would also appreciate tests of fresh installations, with
reports against installation-reports.
arm64 and ppc64el have made enough progress to be release architectures
for Jessie. Regressions for arm64 and ppc64el are now release critical,
but non-regressions are not.
The team discussed kfreebsd at length, but were not satisfied that a
release with Jessie would be of sufficient quality. As a result, they
are dropping it as an official release architecture. They hope that the
porters will be able to make a simultaneous unofficial release.
Fun and Sanity in Debian
------------------------
Enrico Zini was asked, "is there anything happening in Debian besides
systemd?" Of course there is, he thought! We froze on time and with a
very low RC bug count and there is a lot going on. To prove it, and to
honestly answer the question he created a gobby document [33] about "Fun
and Sanity" in Debian then passed the link around in IRC and at the 2014
Cambridge Miniconf. He shared [34] some of the great responses.
33: http://gobby.debian.org/export/minidebconf-uk_2014/Fun%20and%20Sanity
34: http://enricozini.org/2014/debian/fun-and-sanity/
Notes on the Cambridge Mini-DebConf
-----------------------------------
Steve McIntyre posted about the second Mini-DebConf in Cambridge, UK at
the ARM offices. Sprint work was scheduled for Thursday and Friday on a
range of Debian topics: installer, admin, ARM arch support, etc. Several
volunteers from the DebConf video team were on hand, so the talks were
recorded and are online [35].
35:
http://meetings-archive.debian.net/pub/debian-meetings/2014/mini-debconf-cambridge/webm/
The Mini-DebConf went well, and feedback from attendees was universally
positive. He states they may run it again next year, but more
importantly, confirms that they are definitely planning on bidding to
host a full DebConf in Cambridge in the summer of 2017.
DebConf14 final report
----------------------
The final report for DebConf14 [36] has been released, here are a few
excerpts:
36: http://media.debconf.org/dc14/report/DebConf14_final_report.en.pdf
"DebConf talks and discussions are important opportunities to raise new
proposals for development, to inform other contributors about technical
advances they can build on in their own work, and, last but not least,
to manage the wide cooperation required for each new Debian release."
"DebConf is an oasis for those who need to find uninterrupted time to
work on Debian in their regular schedule."
Highlights included the keynote by Prof. Gabriella Coleman, a Q&A
session with Linus Torvalds, plenary talks by former Debian Project
Leader Stefano Zacchiroli, hacking time, ad-hoc sessions, and BOF
meetings. Teams in the background are brought to the forefront with
information and introductions of the video team who capture and make
available many of the talks online.
Debian Description Translation Project
--------------------------------------
Laura Arjona presents a detailed walkthrough [37] on how to translate
package descriptions as part of the Debian Description Translation
Project [38] (DDTP). It is something that anyone can do without having
to have great knowledge of translation tools. The guide has hints, tips,
advice, and a pictorial on how to use the web interface.
37:
http://larjona.wordpress.com/2014/11/19/translating-reviewing-debian-package-descriptions/
38: https://www.debian.org/international/l10n/ddtp
How to get new packages into stable
-----------------------------------
Ever wonder how to get new packages into stable? Neil Williams details
in a blog posting [39] a very useful guide that he had intended to be a
talk at the Mini-DebConf [40] in Cambridge, but instead decided to share
as a useful reference tool for the future. He starts off with some
background on LAVA and tells how he was able to get it into Jessie
through uploads, working with other Debian Developers, team support, and
patience.
39: http://linux.codehelp.co.uk/?p=153
40: https://wiki.debconf.org/wiki/Miniconf-UK/2014
LiMux Munich Bug Squashing Party
--------------------------------
A Bug Squashing Party [41] (BSP [42]) took place in Munich, Germany,
November 21 to 23, sponsored annually by the LiMux project. Several
teams were represented from Debian, KDE PIM, Kubuntu, Kolab, and
LibreOffice. Ovidiu-Florin Bogdan blogged [43] and Jonathan Riddell
posted [44] about major changes coming to Akonadi, framework changes to
KDE, and Qt4 theming with Plasma 5.
41: https://wiki.debian.org/BSP/2014/11/de/Munich
42: https://wiki.debian.org/BSP
43: http://blog.geekaliens.com/2014/11/awesome-bsp-in-munchen/
44: http://jriddell.org/2014/11/22/blog-move-bug-squashing-party-in-munich/
DPN asks: Hams, What do you do?
-------------------------------
Debian [45] is a large and global community of a lot of small actors,
projects, and teams. This month as part of a special feature we'd like
to share with you something about a project or a team that is working in
Debian that you may not be aware of.
45: https://www.debian.org/
Starting this off, we reached out to the Debian Ham-Radio Team [46] with
the question: "Hams, What do you do?"
46: https://wiki.debian.org/DebianHams
Ian Learmonth responds: "The Debian Hamradio Maintainers team
collaborates on maintenance of amateur-radio related packages for
Debian. This includes packaging, writing documentation, providing
description translations and more for amateur-radio related
packages [47]. "
47: https://packages.debian.org/stable/hamradio/
"The team plans to release a Debian Pure Blend for amateur-radio with
the release of Stretch [48]. This will make it easier for end users to
explore the software that is available to them for amateur-radio and
will also allow us to easily provide a live CD with all the amateur-
radio software installed to help people who want to try out Debian but
are not yet ready to install it to their hard drive."
48: https://packages.debian.org/testing/hamradio/
"We've recently had a number of new additions to the team, and these
new additions are being mentored for Debian packaging work by the team.
Packaging teams can be a great place for newcomers to find help with
packaging and you know that the person mentoring you will be interested
in the package too."
Other news
----------
The 37th issue of the miscellaneous news for developers [49] has been
released and covers the following topics:
* Gift QA tag is now an official tag called "newcomer" (⎈)
* Newcomer bugs for pseudopackages in how-can-i-help
* MySQL server and client virtual packages
* As-installed package checking
* Making packages secure with systemd service files
49: https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2014/11/msg00015.html
New Debian Contributors
-----------------------
2 applicants have been accepted [50] as Debian Developers, 9 applicants
have been accepted [51] as Debian Maintainer, and 9 people have started
to maintain packages [52] since the previous issue of the Debian Project
News. Please welcome Matteo F. Vescovi, Tássia Camões Araújo, Andrew
Bartlett, Andreas Moog, Andriy Grytsenko, Fabian Greffrath, Hugo
Lefeuvre, James Cowgill, Jordan Justen, Pierre Blanc, Ross Gammon, Rejah
Rehim, Vincent Hourdin, Victor Fayvel, Shawn Sörbom, Darryl L. Pierce,
Herbert Parentes Fortes Neto, Andreas Stührk, Dmitry Bogatov, and
Christopher Reichert into our project!
50: https://nm.debian.org/public/nmlist#done
51: https://lists.debian.org/debian-project/2014/11/msg00078.html
52: https://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 [53], the upcoming release, Debian "Jessie", is currently
affected by 274 Release-Critical bugs. Ignoring bugs which are easily
solved or on the way to being solved, roughly speaking, about 132
Release-Critical bugs remain to be solved for the release to happen.
53: https://udd.debian.org/bugs.cgi
There are also more detailed statistics [54] as well as some hints on
how to interpret [55] these numbers.
54:
http://richardhartmann.de/blog/posts/2014/11/28-Debian_Release_Critical_Bug_report_for_Week_48/
55: https://wiki.debian.org/ProjectNews/RC-Stats
Important Debian Security Advisories
------------------------------------
Debian's Security Team recently released advisories for these packages
(among others): file [56], libgcrypt11 [57], php5 [58], drupal7 [59],
wireshark [60], openjdk-6 [61], libksba [62], ppp [63], openjdk-7 [64],
libvncserver [65], flac [66], and mutt [67].. Please read them carefully
and take the proper measures.
56: https://www.debian.org/security/2014/dsa-3072
57: https://www.debian.org/security/2014/dsa-3073
58: https://www.debian.org/security/2014/dsa-3074
59: https://www.debian.org/security/2014/dsa-3075
60: https://www.debian.org/security/2014/dsa-3076
61: https://www.debian.org/security/2014/dsa-3077
62: https://www.debian.org/security/2014/dsa-3078
63: https://www.debian.org/security/2014/dsa-3079
64: https://www.debian.org/security/2014/dsa-3080
65: https://www.debian.org/security/2014/dsa-3081
66: https://www.debian.org/security/2014/dsa-3082
67: https://www.debian.org/security/2014/dsa-3083
The Debian team in charge of Squeeze Long Term Support released security
update announcements for these packages: file [68], dbus [69],
ruby1.8 [70], nss [71], imagemagick [72], tomcat6 [73],
tomcat-native [74], libgcrypt11 [75], php5 [76], openjdk-6 [77], and
eglibc [78]. Please read them carefully and take the proper measures.
68: https://lists.debian.org/debian-lts-announce/2014/11/msg00005.html
69: https://lists.debian.org/debian-lts-announce/2014/11/msg00006.html
70: https://lists.debian.org/debian-lts-announce/2014/11/msg00007.html
71: https://lists.debian.org/debian-lts-announce/2014/11/msg00008.html
72: https://lists.debian.org/debian-lts-announce/2014/11/msg00009.html
73: https://lists.debian.org/debian-lts-announce/2014/11/msg00010.html
74: https://lists.debian.org/debian-lts-announce/2014/11/msg00011.html
75: https://lists.debian.org/debian-lts-announce/2014/11/msg00012.html
76: https://lists.debian.org/debian-lts-announce/2014/11/msg00013.html
77: https://lists.debian.org/debian-lts-announce/2014/11/msg00014.html
78: https://lists.debian.org/debian-lts-announce/2014/11/msg00015.html
Debian's Backports Team released advisories for the package
libreoffice [79]. Please read them carefully and take the proper
measures.
79: https://lists.debian.org/debian-backports-announce/2014/11/msg00000.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 [80] (and the separate backports
list [81], stable updates list [82], and long term support security
updates list [83]) for announcements.
80: https://lists.debian.org/debian-security-announce/
81: https://lists.debian.org/debian-backports-announce/
82: https://lists.debian.org/debian-stable-announce/
83: https://lists.debian.org/debian-lts-announce/
New and noteworthy packages
---------------------------
75 packages were added to the unstable Debian archive recently. Among
many others [84] are:
* cpp-mips-linux-gnu — GNU C cross-preprocessor (cpp) for architecture mips
[85]
* fig — Punctual, lightweight development environments using Docker [86]
* fuzzylite — fuzzy logic control binary [87]
* siril — astronomical image processing tool [88]
* xul-ext-video-without-flash — extension to watch videos without the flash
plugin [89]
* yosys — Framework for Verilog RTL synthesis [90]
* apticron — Simple tool to mail about pending package updates [91]
* funkload — web testing tool [92]
* dotclear — open-source web publishing software [93]
* go2 — fast directory finder [94]
84: https://packages.debian.org/unstable/main/newpkg
85: https://packages.debian.org/unstable/main/cpp-mips-linux-gnu
86: https://packages.debian.org/unstable/main/fig
87: https://packages.debian.org/unstable/main/fuzzylite
88: https://packages.debian.org/unstable/main/siril
89: https://packages.debian.org/unstable/main/xul-ext-video-without-flash
90: https://packages.debian.org/unstable/main/yosys
91: https://packages.debian.org/unstable/main/apticron
92: https://packages.debian.org/unstable/main/funkload
93: https://packages.debian.org/unstable/main/dotclear
94: https://packages.debian.org/unstable/main/go2
Work-needing packages
---------------------
Currently [95] 621 packages are orphaned [96] and 148 packages are up
for adoption [97]: please visit the complete list of packages which need
your help [98].
95: https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2014/11/msg00993.html
96: https://www.debian.org/devel/wnpp/orphaned
97: https://www.debian.org/devel/wnpp/rfa
98: https://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 [99] to find out how to help. We're
looking forward to receiving your mail at
<debian-public...@lists.debian.org>.
99: https://wiki.debian.org/ProjectNews/HowToContribute
This issue of Debian Project News was edited by Cédric Boutillier, Jean-
Pierre Giraud, Donald Norwood and Justin B Rye.
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