Hi folks, It's been too long since I've given you an update. I didn't want to push things out while the election was going on, as that seems to annoy some people. And since the election I've been too busy to get round to this. Yes, I suck. Yes, I want to do better at this this year. At least I have a victim^Wminion^helper this year in the form of Luk. \o/ So, on with stuff Releases! --------- Yay! We released Lenny on a totally silly date [1], and that helped us to garner quite a lot of publicity too. Not content with that, we've also pushed out further point releases of both Etch and Lenny. The stable release team will continue with regular point releases of both distributions in the coming months. Press ----- I contacted a lot of journalists specifically about Lenny, both before and after the release: * Sean Kerner at internetnews.com [2] asked about Lenny and how well things were going in general. * I met up with Mike Saunders of Linux Format magazine in the UK and we had a chat about lots of things [3]. Shortly after the Lenny release, they did a special feature edition of the print magazine about Lenny including the full version of that interview, some talks with other DDs and users and a cut-down DVD I prepared for them. * Sam Varghese at ITWire wanted to know what what was new in Lenny, and wanted to encourage people to help test it before the release. * Vincenzo Ciaglia at TuxJournal.net had a large set of questions, as always. I've no idea where the results appeared, though. :-( * I spoke with Tom Callway for ComputerWorld [5] about what Lenny would mean to our users and to our derived distros. * I braved a snowball fight outside the pub in Cambridge for another set of Lenny questions from Gavin Clarke for The Register [6]. * The Linux Outlaws folks spoke with me on the phone, wanting to know more [7]. Phew! There were also some other more general press articles and interviews: * At FOSDEM, the folks from Linux Magazine asked me and some of the other distro folks to take part in a video-based "micro summit" [8]. * A longer interview by mail with Heise online [9]. I have several more interviews lined up, and I'll mention them as/when they appear. Teams ----- Since the last update, there have been a few more changes in our core teams. We have a new secretary team of Kurt Roeckx and Neil McGovern [10]. Ryan Murray has left the ftpmaster team and been replaced by Mark Hymers [11], and we have several new volunteers for the Policy Team: Andrew McMillan, Bill Allombert, and Colin Watson. Thanks to all of them! After a little discussion, Luk and I have agreed that we're not immediately going to repeat the teams survey I ran this time last year[12]. Based on those results, there are still a couple more teams we want to help. If you think there are any more places we should be looking, please contact us at leader@debian.org. Talks ----- Not much to report right now. I saw a lot of folks at FOSDEM in February, which was cool. At the beer event on the Friday night, there were DDs everywhere. :-) I gave a talk entitled "What does the DPL do?" [13, 14] that seemed to be useful for people. I have invitations to speak at more forthcoming conferences over the next couple of months, but nothing concrete yet. Google Summer of Code 2009 -------------------------- Obey Arthur Liu, one of our successful students from last year, has been working tirelessly this year as an admin helping to run our GSoC efforts [15]. We have been selected as a mentoring organisation for the 4th year running, and we will have another ten students working with us again this year on a wide variety of projects [16]. The students and their mentors should be showing up on Planet in the next few weeks, blogging about what they're doing. DebConf 9 - coming soon! ------------------------ The deadlines have now passed for applying for sponsorship to travel to DebConf this year in Spain [17], but people are still welcome to sign up to attend. The team are right now working hard to finish off the last details of the venue, accommodation etc. 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 July - see you there! [1] http://lists.debian.org/debian-announce/2009/msg00002.html [2] http://www.internetnews.com/software/article.php/3802906/Debian+Lenny+A+Linux+Valentine+Release.htm [3] http://tuxradar.com/content/lenny-has-landed [4] http://www.itwire.com/content/view/23221/1090/1/0/ [5] http://www.computerworlduk.com/community/blogs/index.cfm?entryid=1857&blogid=17 [6] http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/02/16/debian_lenny_released/ [7] http://linuxoutlaws.com/podcast/77 [8] http://www.linux-magazin.de/news/video_mini_summit_der_distributionen_bei_der_fosdem [9] http://www.h-online.com/open/Interview-Steve-McIntyre-of-Debian--/features/112783 [10] http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2009/02/msg00009.html [11] http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2009/03/msg00007.html [12] http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2008/04/msg00014.html [13] http://www.einval.com/~steve/talks/FOSDEM2009/ [14] http://meetings-archive.debian.net/Public/debian-meetings/2009/fosdem/low/What_does_the_DPL_do.ogg [15] http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2009/03/msg00012.html [16] http://wiki.debian.org/SummerOfCode2009#SelectedProjects [17] http://debconf9.debconf.org/ Cheers! -- Steve McIntyre, Debian Project Leader <leader@debian.org>
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