Debian Project News - August 26th, 2010
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The Debian Project http://www.debian.org/
Debian Project News debian-publicity@lists.debian.org
August 26th, 2010 http://debian.org/News/weekly/2010/10/
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Welcome to this year's tenth issue of DPN, the newsletter for the
Debian community. Topics covered in this issue include:
* Debian turns 17
* Screenshots atpackages.debian.org
* Some bits from ARM porters
* Join the DebConf Team
* Progress of the Debian GNU/kFreeBSD port
* Bits from the MIA team
* ... and much more.
Debian turns 17
---------------
The seventeenth birthday of the Debian Project caused quite [1] some
[2] media [3] echo [4], birthday parties [5] and congratulations
[6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20].
1 : http://www.tecchannel.de/pc_mobile/news/2030272/debian_wird_17_jahre_alt/
2 : http://www.itwire.com/opinion-and-analysis/open-sauce/41241-how-to-thank-debian-for-17-great-years
3 : http://www.dobreprogramy.pl/Debian-ma-juz-lat,Aktualnosc,19930.html
4 : http://www.marlexsystems.org/debian-festeja-17-anos-de-existencia/11374/
5 : http://wiki.debian.org/DebianDay2010
6 : http://www.markshuttleworth.com/archives/478
7 : http://jonathancarter.org/2010/08/16/happy-birthday-debian-2/
8 : http://news.debian.net/
9 : http://blog.venthur.de/2010/08/16/happy-birthday-debian/
10 : http://digitizor.com/2010/08/16/happy-17th-birthday-debian-and-some-interesting-history/
11 : http://www.stormos.org/node/2327
12 : http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/debian-26/happy-17th-birthday-debian-826722/
13 : http://www.linux.com/community/blogs/happy-17th-birthday-debian.html
14 : http://lists.debian.org/20100816111701.717D7C818@nereida.gnuservers.com.ar
15 : http://www.lucas-nussbaum.net/blog/?p=541
16 : http://andrew.mcmillan.net.nz/blog/thank_you_debian
17 : http://www.itoperationz.com/2010/08/happy-birthday-debian/
18 : http://blog.irwan.name/?p=1520
19 : http://insidesocal.com/click/2010/08/happy-belated-birthday-debian.html
20 : http://upsilon.cc/~zack/blog/posts/2010/08/happy_birthday_debian/
As a surprise present for most Debian contributors, Maintainers and
Developers, users were asked to submit their thanks via the website
thanks.debian.net [21], and birthday balloons pointing to that page
were added to several of Debian's web services.
21 : http://thanks.debian.net
About 3000 submissions [22] were received, ranging from plain "Thanks"
in various forms, up toheartwarming [23] messages in (to most of us)
foreign languages [24]. We would like to thank all users for their
feedback, which really strengthened our project's morale and
motivation! Thanks!
22 : http://thank.debian.net/read_thanks
23 : http://www.marga.com.ar/blog/index.cgi/debian/Debian_Appreciation_Day_Recap.html
24 : http://thank.debian.net/message/136
As an unrelated sidenote, the editor would also like to mention that
Debian's bug submission tool [25]reportbug supports a --kudos option,
making it easy to submit thanks to package maintainers on the other 364
days of the year ;).
25 : http://bugs.debian.org/reportbug
Screenshots at packages.debian.org
----------------------------------
As it is often easier to get an impression of an application by looking
at screenshots, instead of just reading a descriptive text, Gerfried
Fuchs has integrated the [26]screenshots.debian.net service into the
package information at [27]packages.debian.org. See for example the
screenshot of the package extremetuxracer [28].
26 : http://screenshots.debian.net
27 : http://packages.debian.org
28 : http://packages.debian.org/sid/extremetuxracer
For packages that do not yet have a screenshot available, a placeholder
image is shown. Users are encouraged to contribute by uploading their
own screenshots for their favourite applications.
Some bits from ARM porters
--------------------------
Riku Voipio published some "unofficial bits from the ARM porters [29]"
in which he thanked ARM and Canonical for sponsoring new machines for
the project. Besides giving Debian Contributors a three times faster
machine for their development work, it has allowed the buildd
infrastructure of machines automatically building new packages for
specific architectures and suites to be renewed, so that experimental
packages,volatile [30] packages, non-free packages and packages from
[31]backports.org are now automatically built as well. Finally, he
announced some work being done on a Hardfloat ARM port [32], which will
work better on newer ARM processors with a hardware floating-point
unit.
29 : http://suihkulokki.blogspot.com/2010/08/unnofficial-bits-from-arm-porters.html
30 : http://www.debian.org/volatile/
31 : http://www.backports.org/
32 : http://lists.debian.org/debian-arm/2010/08/msg00008.html
Join the DebConf Team
---------------------
Richard Darst started a series of blog posts about the organisation of
the annual Debian Conference [33] by commenting on the recent "DebConf
& Debian" discussion. He doesn't see a difference between the two, and
invites all interested people to join the organisation team by
subscribing to theDebConf team mailing list [34] and joining the
#debconf-team IRC channel on irc.debian.org. In his second post [35],
he explained the timeline of a DebConf.
33 : http://debian-administration.org/users/rkd/weblog/1
34 : http://lists.debconf.org/mailman/listinfo/debconf-team
35 : http://debian-administration.org/users/rkd/weblog/2
Progress of the Debian GNU/kFreeBSD port
----------------------------------------
Different aspects of the port of the Debian operating system to the
FreeBSD kernel [36] have made great progress recently. The Debian
installer has been upgraded [37] to the FreeBSD kernel version 8.1,
which also allows the installation system to be used in languages other
than English. Also the debian-cd [38] scripts used to create CD and DVD
images now support the creation of the new architectures [39]. Daily
build images for Debian unstable are already available; daily and
weekly builds for "Squeeze" will be made available with the next beta
release of the Debian installer. However, the Debian GNU/kFreeBSD
related web pages are outdated, and help is needed tofix the web and
wiki pages [40].
36 : http://www.debian.org/ports/kfreebsd-gnu/
37 : http://lists.debian.org/20100818113558.GA24988@hall.aurel32.net
38 : http://packages.debian.org/debian-cd
39 : http://blog.einval.com/2010/08/20#kfreebsd_cds
40 : http://lists.debian.org/4C6EAAE9.7090500@aurel32.net
Bits from the MIA team
----------------------
Jan Hauke Rahm sent some bits from the MIA team [41], which tries to
identify and handle package maintainers who sadly have become inactive.
He gave some advice on how package maintainers should react when they
think a package has been neglected by its maintainer, and stressed that
the work of the "MIA" team is an important aspect of quality assurance.
41 : http://lists.debian.org/20100819082337.GA3379@ca.home.jhr-online.de
Other news
----------
Valessio Brito wondered [42] whether a webchat interface similar to the
one used during the last Debian conference should be permanently
available, to make it easier for users unfamiliar with IRC to join.
42 : http://lists.debian.org/20100822233610.17057e8pnlc6inq2@ssl.eumx.net
Martin Zobel-Helas noted [43] that now more than 50% of Debian's hosts
and public services are reachable over IPv6.
43 : http://lists.debian.org/20100817190121.GA31072@ftbfs.de
Release-critical bugs statistics for the upcoming release
---------------------------------------------------------
According to the unofficial release-critical bug counter [44], the
upcoming release, Debian 6.0 "Squeeze" , is currently affected by 302
release-critical bugs. Ignoring bugs which are easily solved or on the
way to being solved, roughly speaking, about 128 release critical bugs
remain to be solved for the release to happen.
44 : http://bts.turmzimmer.net/details.php
There are also more detailed statistics [45] as well as some hints on
how to interpret [46] these numbers.
45 : http://blog.schmehl.info/Debian/rc-stats/#2010-33
46 : http://wiki.debian.org/ProjectNews/RC-Stats
Important Debian Security Advisories
------------------------------------
Debian's Security Team recently released advisories for these packages
(among others): squirrelmail [47], lxr-cvs [48], smarty (update) [49],
ghostscript [50], Linux 2.6.26 [51], lvm2 [52], and zope-ldapuserfolder
[53]. Please read them carefully and take the proper measures.
47 : http://www.debian.org/security/2010/dsa-2091
48 : http://www.debian.org/security/2010/dsa-2092
49 : http://www.debian.org/security/2010/dsa-1919
50 : http://www.debian.org/security/2010/dsa-2093
51 : http://www.debian.org/security/2010/dsa-2094
52 : http://www.debian.org/security/2010/dsa-2095
53 : http://www.debian.org/security/2010/dsa-2096
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 [54] for announcements.
54 : http://lists.debian.org/debian-security-announce/
New and noteworthy packages
---------------------------
The following packages were added to the unstable Debian archive
recently (among others [55]):
55 : http://packages.debian.org/unstable/main/newpkg
* 3depict -- visualisation and analysis for single valued point data [56]
* bluedevil -- KDE Bluetooth stack [57]
* eatmydata -- library and utilities designed to disable fsync and friends [58]
* font-manager -- font management application for the GNOME desktop [59]
* freetts -- speech synthesis system [60]
* gitit -- wiki engine backed by a Git or Darcs filestore [61]
* luakit -- fast and small web browser extensible by Lua [62]
* mpris-remote -- command-line interface for MPRIS compatible media players [63]
* mricron -- magnetic resonance image conversion, viewing and analysis [64]
* phoneui-apps -- SHR applications [65]
* spectacle -- RPM Spec file generator and management tool [66]
* stackapplet -- panel applet to track reputation on StackExchange sites [67]
* wordpress-shibboleth -- Shibboleth plugin for WordPress [68]
56 : http://packages.debian.org/unstable/main/3depict
57 : http://packages.debian.org/unstable/main/bluedevil
58 : http://packages.debian.org/unstable/main/eatmydata
59 : http://packages.debian.org/unstable/main/font-manager
60 : http://packages.debian.org/unstable/main/freetts
61 : http://packages.debian.org/unstable/main/gitit
62 : http://packages.debian.org/unstable/main/luakit
63 : http://packages.debian.org/unstable/main/mpris-remote
64 : http://packages.debian.org/unstable/main/mricron
65 : http://packages.debian.org/unstable/main/phoneui-apps
66 : http://packages.debian.org/unstable/main/spectacle
67 : http://packages.debian.org/unstable/main/stackapplet
68 : http://packages.debian.org/unstable/main/wordpress-shibboleth
Work-needing packages
---------------------
Currently 576 packages are orphaned and 135 packages are up for
adoption. Please take a look at the recent [69] reports [70] to see if
there are packages you are interested in or view the complete list of
packages which need your help [71].
69 : http://lists.debian.org/E1Oji8F-0004w9-3M@merkel.debian.org
70 : http://lists.debian.org/E1OmFTO-0002lR-Jb@merkel.debian.org
71 : 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 [72] to find out how to help.
We're looking forward to receiving your mail at
debian-publicity@lists.debian.org [73].
72 : http://wiki.debian.org/ProjectNews/HowToContribute
73 : mailto:debian-publicity@lists.debian.org
This issue of Debian Project News was edited by Jeremiah C. Foster and
Alexander Reichle-Schmehl [74].
74 : mailto:debian-publicity@lists.debian.org
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