Hey folks, Phew, it's been a busy time lately. It's time I gave you an update on what I've been up to. Interviews ---------- I've spoken to quite a few journalists in the last month. You've probably already seen/heard some of these elsewhere, but just in case you haven't: * A general interview for ITWire in Australia [1]. * Another general discussion with ComputerWorldUK [2]. * A weird(!) interview with ZDNet where the journalist seemed to care mostly about how Debian makes money [3]. * I also had a phone interview with a writer from the Register in the UK - some of it summarised in [4], related to [5]. * I spoke with Patrick Davila on the Linux Link Tech Show, a New York based Linux radio show [6]. I hope that I'm coming across OK in the press so far; there are a few more people talking to me about future interviews as well. Delegations ----------- I'm not planning to compete with Sam for bombshells in terms of delegations, but I do have news on this front. I've already announced that Christoph Berg has joined the DAM team [7]. I'm also announcing today that Jonathan McDowell has been added to the keyring maintenance team. He will continue working with James Troup on adding/removing keys as needed, and they are setting up procedures with DSA to allow for easy integration with our LDAP database. The best way to ask for key updates is to use rt.debian.org as previously announced[8]. I'm sure (prod!) that Jonathan will tell us more about his plans soon. I'm hoping to announce even more delegation updates in the near future; I'll let you know as I have more news. We've also seen other personnel changes in core teams lately. Shortly after the DPL handover, Anthony Towns stepped down from most of the teams where he was a member [9]. He's been a valuable contributor for several years, and I hope he'll be back soon. Andreas Barth has also relinquished his Release Manager powers, passing them on to Marc Brockschmidt [10]. I want to publically thank Andi for his dedication and huge efforts to date as an RM, and I know he'll be continuing to help as a Release Wizard for a while to come. Teams review ------------ You'll hopefully have found it difficult to miss me starting on the review of teams that I promised during my DPL election campaign. I spammed a lot of our lists with a survey [11] to ask for views on how our teams are working, and I've had lots of responses so far. Thanks for those! There is still some time remaining until the submissions deadline of 23:59:59 UTC, Sunday 25th May; if you haven't told me about your team workings yet, please get back to me *soon*. To further help me get an idea of how some of our teams are responding, I've also been given an account with extra access to rt.debian.org so that I can see all the queues and tickets. Summer of Code 2008 ------------------- We've again been selected as a mentoring organisation for Google's Summer of Code programme [12]. They're funding 12 students to work on projects with us this summer. Hopefully this will lead to some giid successful projects and some reall enthusiastic new contributors for us. Debconf coming soon! -------------------- Preparations are still ongoing for Debconf 8 in Mar del Plata, Argentina [13]. There should be announcements soon from the team about papers, talks and sponsorship. As always, we're also still looking for more companies and individuals to sponsor the conference - please contact sponsors@debconf.org if you can help. I'm looking forwards to meeting even more of our developers and users in August - see you there! Lenny ----- Work is still ongoing, with some large transitions in process right now. D-I is progressing towards another beta release soon, which should also be the basis of the (slightly delayed) Etch and a Half update. There's still plenty of work to be done before Lenny is ready. Let's all pull together and we can make it happen. There are more BSPs planned in the next few months too; I'll let the Release Team announce them as plans are finalised. And finally, openssl... ----------------------- We've all been hit by the openssl problem that was announced a couple of days ago [14]. There has been a lot of press about it, and many of us have had a lot of work to do to re-secure our servers. Please try not to be too negative about it; we can all make mistakes. One of our strengths, and one of the reasons why our users like and trust us so much, is that we don't try to hide our problems. I have seen a few suggestions of how to increase the amount of review our patches are getting and how to improve our processes. Let's see what we can do to learn from this and do better in the future. [1] http://www.itwire.com/content/view/17716/1090/ [2] http://www.computerworlduk.com/community/blogs/index.cfm?RSS&entryid=741 [3] http://news.zdnet.co.uk/software/0,1000000121,39406494,00.htm [4] http://www.regdeveloper.co.uk/2008/04/21/debian_developers_approved/ [5] http://www.regdeveloper.co.uk/2008/04/16/debian_drags_feet/ [6] http://www.tllts.org/audio/tllts_244-05-07-08.ogg [7] http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2008/04/msg00015.html [8] http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2007/03/msg00018.html [9] http://azure.humbug.org.au/~aj/blog/2008/04/18#2008-04-18-on-freedom [10] http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2008/05/msg00000.html [11] http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2008/04/msg00014.html [12] http://wiki.debian.org/SummerOfCode2008 [13] http://debconf8.debconf.org/ [14] http://lists.debian.org/debian-security-announce/2008/msg00152.html -- Steve McIntyre, Debian Project Leader <leader@debian.org>
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