Debian Project News - July 12th, 2010
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The Debian Project http://www.debian.org/
Debian Project News debian-publicity@lists.debian.org
July 12th, 2010 http://debian.org/News/weekly/2010/07/
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Welcome to this year's seventh issue of DPN, the newsletter for the
Debian community. Topics covered in this issue include:
* Bug Squashing Party - Munich
* Organise a "DebianDay" in your city?
* Bits and request for help from the listmasters
* Report from FAI workshop 2010
* Bits from the Debian Project Leader
* Website redesign progress
* DebConf 12 will be held in... your country?
* Report from the Skolelinux project in Rhineland-Palatinate, Germany
* ... and much more.
Bug Squashing Party in Munich
-----------------------------
Michael Banck announced a Bug-Squashing-Party [1] in Munich over the
weekend of the 17th and 18th of July. The BSP will again take place at
the LiMux Project Office in the city centre. See the wiki page for
further information and directions [2].
1 : http://lists.debian.org/20100707175939.GA3744@nighthawk.chemicalconnection.dyndns.org
2 : http://wiki.debian.org/BSP2010/Munich
Contributions by non-DDs are welcome; the BSP will be attended by
several Debian Developers who will be able to upload fixes. Michael
Banck will again try prepare an introductory session on Friday evening
for people who have not attended a BSP before.
Organise a "DebianDay" in your city?
------------------------------------
With Debian's 17th birthday coming up on August the 16th [3], the wider
Debian community all over the world is invited to organise local
"DebianDay" gatherings and one-day conferences for users, contributors
and developers.
3 : http://groups.google.com/group/comp.os.linux.development/msg/a32d4e2ef3bcdcc6
Information and tips [4] are available in the Debian wiki, which already
also contains some DebianDay Artwork [5].
4 : http://wiki.debian.org/DebianDay2010
5 : http://wiki.debian.org/DebianDayArtwork
Bits and request for help from the listmasters
----------------------------------------------
Listmaster Martin Zobel-Helas requested help [6] in maintaining Debian's
mailing lists. Some topics which should be addressed are the MHonArc
scripts which generate the web archive (mixing code and design, making
it difficult to make any changes to the design) and the constant work on
improving the spam filters and cleansing the archive of received spam.
Martin noted that the spam filtering rules [7] are publicly accessible,
and welcomes hints on how to improve them. Last, but not least, he
mentioned that when subscribing to Debian mailing lists you should avoid
bouncing spam which made it through your filters. Listmasters would
prefer such spam from liszt.debian.org to be discarded.
6 : http://lists.debian.org/20100702221307.GA25104@ftbfs.de
7 : svn://svn.debian.org/svn/pkg-listmaster/trunk/spamassassin_config
Report from FAI workshop 2010
-----------------------------
From 2nd of July to 4th of July the FAI [8] workshop in Linuxhotel
Essen/Germany took place. Nine FAI developers/users met to discuss and
work on FAI in preparation for the Debian "Squeeze" release. A report
about the meeting is availableon Michael Prokop's blog [9].
8 : http://www.informatik.uni-koeln.de/fai/
9 : http://michael-prokop.at/blog/2010/07/08/report-from-fai-developer-workshop-072010/
The FAI developers want to thank the sponsors (Debian, Linuxhotel, Linux
Information Systems AG, Netways, Spotify, Thomas-Krenn.AG) for funding
the developer meeting.
FAI [10] is a non-interactive system to install, customise and manage
Linux systems and software configurations on computers as well as
virtual machines and chroot environments, from small networks to
large-scale infrastructures and clusters.
10 : http://www.informatik.uni-koeln.de/fai/
Bits from the Debian Project Leader
-----------------------------------
Debian Project Leader Stefano Zacchiroli sent a new bits from the DPL
[11] report. He mentions several conferences he was invited to as well
as interviews published in different media. He also talks about the
recently founded [12] "derivatives front desk" , which is a central
place for Debian derivatives to discuss collaboration with the Debian
Project. As there haven't been enough volunteers for the team
declassifying the archive of the private Debian mailing list, he just
documented the the status of the implementation of that general
resolution [13].
11 : http://lists.debian.org/20100627213423.GA20648@upsilon.cc
12 : http://www.debian.org/News/2010/20100629
13 : http://www.debian.org/vote/2005/vote_002
Website redesign progress
-------------------------
Quite some time has passed since Kalle Söderman created a proposal for a
redesign of Debian's webpresence [14] (including subdomains, like the
wiki [15] and the mailinglist archive [16]). However, recently quite a
lot [17] has happened [18], with prototypes of the new design [19] being
tested at the Git webfrontend [20], the mailing lists webfrontend [21]
and the internal wiki of Debian's sysadmin team [22]. While some bugs in
different browsers remain and need to be fixed, it looks promising!
14 : http://www.kalleswork.net/projects/debian/
15 : http://wiki.debian.org/
16 : http://lists.debian.org/
17 : http://lists.debian.org/20100621072114.GA30254@anguilla.debian.or.at
18 : http://lists.debian.org/20100621223002.GE1974@ftbfs.de
19 : http://www.deb.at/index.en.html
20 : http://git.deb.at/
21 : http://lists.deb.at/
22 : http://dsa.debian.org/
DebConf 12 will be held in... your country?
-------------------------------------------
With this year's annual Debian Conference [23] coming up, Gunnar Wolf,
one of the organisers of the Debian Conference encouraged [24] people to
think whether they would like to host the Debian Conference in the year
2012 in their city. As proposals are accepted till the end of the year,
working on such proposals should start soonish, which can be presented
at the upcoming conference. Please see the DebConf wiki [25] for
information.
23 : http://debconf10.debconf.org/
24 : http://lists.debconf.org/lurker/message/20100626.163252.16c1e90a.en.html
25 : http://wiki.debconf.org/wiki/DebConf12
In related news, Stefano Zacchiroli announced the results of the DebConf
Newbie initiative [26] and noted that there is still need for more money
for DebConf travel sponsorship to bring even more Debian Contributors to
the upcoming conference in New York City.
26 : http://upsilon.cc/~zack/blog/posts/2010/06/welcome_DebConf_newbies/
Report from the Skolelinux project in Rhineland-Palatinate, Germany
-------------------------------------------------------------------
Debian Developer Philipp Huebner gave a report about the state of the
Debian-Edu based distribution for schools in the federal state
Rhineland-Palatinate [27] in Germany. To ensure the sustainability of
the installations it was decided that documentation and developed
features should be integrated into the official Debian Pure Blend
Debian-Edu / Skolelinux. That's similar to what has been done with
features developed for the Debian based installations in the
Extremadura, Spain. [28]
27 : http://lists.debian.org/4C230E40.10704@debian.org
28 : http://lists.debian.org/20100624081405.GB5733@login1.uio.no
Other news
----------
Ritesh Raj Sarraf noticed [29] that the recent upload of the Linux
kernel adds support for kprobe, making SystemTap, a tool to monitor
Linux kernel internal data, a much more useful instrument.
29 : http://www.researchut.com/blog/archive/2010/07/08/systemtap-in-debian
Cyril Brulebois from Debian's "X Strike Force" called for help testing
thexserver-xorg-video-intel driver [30] for Intel based graphic cards.
As they are considering introducing version 2.12 of the driver, after
the last two versions contained quite a few regressions, any reports
about working setups or noted regressions would be quite helpful.
30 : http://ikibiki.org//blog/2010/07/04/We_need_you_redux/
New Developers and Maintainers
------------------------------
Four applicants have been accepted [31] as Debian Developers and two
applicants has been accepted [32] as Debian Maintainer since the
previous issue of the Debian Project News. Please welcome Thomas
Goirand, Georges Khaznadar, Adrian Perez, Felipe Sateler, Deepak
Tripathi and Stefan Völkel into our project!
31 : http://lists.debian.org/E1OT1hh-0001zw-Gp@merkel.debian.org
32 : http://lists.debian.org/E1OTQCx-00054Y-P6@ries.debian.org
Release-critical bugs statistics for the upcoming release
---------------------------------------------------------
According to the unofficial release-critical bug counter [33], the
upcoming release, Debian 6.0 "Squeeze" , is currently affected by 401
release-critical bugs. 95 of them have already been fixed in Debian's
"unstable" branch. Of the remaining 306 release-critical bugs, 49
already have a patch (which might need testing) and 16 are marked as
pending.
33 : http://bts.turmzimmer.net/details.php
Ignoring these bugs as well as release-critical bugs for packages in
contrib or non-free, 163 release-critical bugs remain to be solved for
the release to happen.
Important Debian Security Advisories
------------------------------------
Debian's Security Team recently released advisories for these packages
(among others): wireshark [34], mahara [35], pcsc-lite [36] (updated)
and python-cjson [37]. Please read them carefully and take the proper
measures.
34 : http://www.debian.org/security/2010/dsa-2066
35 : http://www.debian.org/security/2010/dsa-2067
36 : http://www.debian.org/security/2010/dsa-2059
37 : http://www.debian.org/security/2010/dsa-2068
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 [38] for announcements.
38 : http://lists.debian.org/debian-security-announce/
New and noteworthy packages
---------------------------
The following packages were added to the unstable Debian archive
recently (among others [39]):
39 : http://packages.debian.org/unstable/main/newpkg
* amavisd-milter -- amavisd-new interface for milter-capable MTAs [40]
* autotrash -- purges files from your trash based on age and/or filename [41]
* cutycapt -- utility to capture WebKit's rendering of a web page [42]
* dlm-pcmk -- Red Hat Cluster Suite - DLM Pacemaker module [43]
* eclipse-emf -- Eclipse Modeling Framework (EMF) [44]
* googlecl -- command-line tool for access to (some) Google services [45]
* latexml -- LaTeX to XML Converter [46]
* leksah -- Haskell editor - GHC interface [47]
* lintex -- automatic cleanup of old TeX-related files [48]
* linux-tools-2.6 -- performance analysis tools for Linux 2.6 [49]
* mic2 -- image creator tool for MeeGo [50]
* monajat-applet -- Islamic supplications tray applet [51]
* musescore -- full featured WYSIWYG score editor [52]
* netperfmeter -- network performance meter [53]
* petit -- log analysis tool for syslog, Apache and raw log files [54]
* puppet-testsuite -- centralized configuration management control for networks [55]
* qwbfsmanager -- graphical file manager for the WBFS filesystem [56]
* svn-all-fast-export -- fast-import based converter to convert repos from Subversion to Git [57]
* threadscope -- graphical thread profiler for Haskell programs [58]
* vocproc -- LV2 plugin for pitch shifting and vocoding [59]
* zp -- ZPAQ open standard maximum compressor (prebuilt levels) [60]
40 : http://packages.debian.org/unstable/main/amavisd-milter
41 : http://packages.debian.org/unstable/main/autotrash
42 : http://packages.debian.org/unstable/main/cutycapt
43 : http://packages.debian.org/unstable/main/dlm-pcmk
44 : http://packages.debian.org/unstable/main/eclipse-emf
45 : http://packages.debian.org/unstable/main/googlecl
46 : http://packages.debian.org/unstable/main/latexml
47 : http://packages.debian.org/unstable/main/leksah
48 : http://packages.debian.org/unstable/main/lintex
49 : http://packages.debian.org/unstable/main/linux-tools-2.6
50 : http://packages.debian.org/unstable/main/mic2
51 : http://packages.debian.org/unstable/main/monajat
52 : http://packages.debian.org/unstable/main/musescore
53 : http://packages.debian.org/unstable/main/netperfmeter
54 : http://packages.debian.org/unstable/main/petit
55 : http://packages.debian.org/unstable/main/puppet-testsuite
56 : http://packages.debian.org/unstable/main/qwbfsmanager
57 : http://packages.debian.org/unstable/main/svn-all-fast-export
58 : http://packages.debian.org/unstable/main/threadscope
59 : http://packages.debian.org/unstable/main/vocproc
60 : http://packages.debian.org/unstable/main/zp
Work-needing packages
---------------------
Currently 617 packages are orphaned and 140 packages are up for
adoption. Please take a look at the recent [61] reports [62] to see if
there are packages you are interested in or view the complete list of
packages which need your help [63].
61 : http://lists.debian.org/E1OUU7F-0003IL-F2@merkel.debian.org
62 : http://lists.debian.org/E1OX1S9-0003vr-Mk@merkel.debian.org
63 : http://www.debian.org/devel/wnpp/help_requested
Want to continue reading DPN?
-----------------------------
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Please see the contributing page [64] to find out how to help. We're
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64 : http://wiki.debian.org/ProjectNews/HowToContribute
65 : mailto:debian-publicity@lists.debian.org
This issue of Debian Project News was edited by Michael Prokop, Jeremiah
Foster and Alexander Reichle-Schmehl [66].
66 : mailto:debian-publicity@lists.debian.org
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