------------------------------------------------------------------------ The Debian Project http://www.debian.org/ Debian Project News debian-publicity@lists.debian.org April 2nd, 2012 http://www.debian.org/News/weekly/2012/07/ ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Welcome to this year's seventh issue of DPN, the newsletter for the Debian community. Topics covered in this issue include: * Bits from Debian Med team * Debian joins the OSI * Report from DSA Team sprint * "Fascinating": a Debian based tricorder * So long, and thanks for all the news * Interviews * 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? Bits from Debian Med team ------------------------- Andreas Tille sent some bits from the Debian Med team [1], where he talked about recent initiatives of the team including the [2] "Debian Med Bug Squashing Advent Calendar 2011" and the [3] "Mentoring of the Month" (MoM) project. Andreas also reminded us that in January the Debian Med project reached 10: in ten years, Debian Med has grown from a one man project to a "strong team maintaining a set of over 200 highly specialised packages with a high quality standard", as Andreas said in arelated blogpost [4]. The Debian Med project not only provides and maintains specialised packages for biology and medicine, but is — like other Debian Blends — "a nice entry point for people to join Debian because newcomers can identify themselves with a known topic (the scope of the Blend — in this case medicine and bioinformatics) first and learn Debian rules in a team with common interest", added Andreas in the mail. This idea was confirmed by the results of asurvey focused on why Debian Med team members became Debian Developers [5]. 1: http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2012/03/msg00009.html 2: http://debian-med.alteholz.de/advent/ 3: http://wiki.debian.org/DebianMed/MoM 4: http://debianmed.blogspot.com/2012/01/10-anniversary-of-debian-med-posted-by.html 5: http://wiki.debian.org/DebianMed/Developers Debian joins the OSI -------------------- The Debian project announced that it is joining the [6] "Open Source Initiative (OSI)" as an affiliate. The OSI was founded in 1998 with the aim of explaining, advocating, and protecting the term "open source". For many years now, the OSI has helped the "Open Source" trademark gain recognition, particularly in the corporate world. 6: http://www.debian.org/News/2012/20120330 Report from DSA Team sprint --------------------------- Luca Filipozzi wrote a report from the Debian System Administrators ([7] "DSA") team's sprint held over the weekend of 16-18 March in Oslo, Norway. During the meeting the team discussed a long-term plan for Debian's infrastructure, reviewing the machines currently administrated, and formulating procedures regarding account and group management. One of the main points discussed at the meeting was the necessity to renew the set of machines — which are now old and long out of warranty — and how to do it. While in the past Debian's hardware requirements were met by donations of new and used hardware from individuals and organizations, this is no longer true. The team elaborated a "Five Year Plan" for a hardware refresh cycle to avoid to having machines more than five years old. "A clear outcome of our work on the Five Year Plan is an understanding that hardware has now become one of the biggest expense categories for Debian", said Luca. Various machines are also needed in order to support the whole set of architectures for which Debian is shipped. For more information on how to donate equipment to the Debian Project, please contact thehardware donations team [8]. The DSA sprint was made possible by donations [9] to Debian and by Varnish Software who hosted it and provided food and drink. Thank you! 7: http://lists.debian.org/debian-project/2012/03/msg00032.html 8: mailto:hardware-donations@debian.org 9: http://www.debian.org/donations "Fascinating": a Debian based tricorder --------------------------------------- Peter Jansen, a cognitive science researcher, brought to life Spock's tricorder [10] from the popular Star Trek television series. Peter, in fact, developed a handheld device able — thanks to its embedded sensors — to measure various environmental parameters (link temperature, humidity, magnetic fields, etc.). The device runs Debian GNU/Linux on an ARM920T-based Atmel microcontroller: the hardware specifications and schematics, and the software are licensed respectively under TAPR non-commercial and GPL 3 and are available on the project website [11]. 10: http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/news/2012/03/researcher-publishes-specs-for-real-linux-powered-star-trek-tricorder 11: http://www.tricorderproject.org/ So long, and thanks for all the news ------------------------------------ The year was 2006. The place: Oaxtepec, Mexico. The event: DebConf6. This is how the Publicity team was born [12], during a BoF titled "Representing Debian". And among others there were two Debian contributors (who later became Debian Developers), Alexander Schmehl and Meike Reichle. If you are a regular reader of Debian Project News, or a contributor to the Publicity Team, you'll surely recognize their names: they worked every day for the last six years to bring us news about the Debian world and to announce important changes inside the project. Alexander and Meike have now decided to step down from the Press and Publicity team [13] and start another, different adventure [14]. The Publicity Team would like to thank them for their tireless effort, their creativity and their inspiring work. So long, and thanks for all the news! 12: http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2006/06/msg00005.html 13: http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2012/03/msg00011.html 14: http://blog.alphascorpii.net/english/personal/to-those.html Interviews ---------- Raphaël Hertzog published a "People behind Debian" interview with Jörg Jaspert [15] (FTPmaster, Debian Account Manager, and more), while Petter Reinholdtsen interviewed John Ingleby [16] for his "Debian Edu interviews" series. 15: http://raphaelhertzog.com/2012/03/23/people-behind-debian-joerg-jaspert/ 16: http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__John_Ingleby.html In addition, Chris Woolfrey interviewed Guido Günther [17]. Zlatan Todorić interviewed Joey Hess [18] about his participation at DebConf11, held last August in Banja Luka. 17: http://blogs.fsfe.org/fellowship-interviews/?p=547 18: http://ulk.rs.ba/debian/intervju-sa-joey-hessom Other news ---------- Stefan Fritsch posted some bits from the Apache Maintainers [19] announcing some changes — a new set of packaging guidelines, a recent major Apache HTTPD upgrade, and an upcoming package transition. 19: http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2012/03/msg00013.html Axel Beckert recently wrote about the (perhaps temporary) disappearance of aptitude-gtk [20]. The new team is currently focusing on the internal code and the native ncurses user interface, but anyone who wants to contribute to the GUI is welcome to join the Aptitude team [21]. 20: http://noone.org/blog/English/Computer/Debian/aptitude-gtk%20will%20likely%20vanish.html 21: http://lists.alioth.debian.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/aptitude-devel Kurt Roeckx announced that the DPL candidates' rebuttals have been published [22] and are now available as part of their platforms [23], and also sent out the call for votes [24]. Voting closes on Saturday 14 April. 22: https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2012/03/msg00010.html 23: http://www.debian.org/vote/2012/vote_001/ 24: https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2012/03/msg00015.html Stefano Zacchiroli announced that the LDAP dnsZoneEntry attribute for *.debian.net domains will be made publicly accessible in two weeks [25]. The intention is to provide an easier way to view the data, which is currently only available via a DNS query. 25: https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2012/03/msg00008.html Jan Hauke Rahm wrote a report from the Front Desk and DAM sprint [26] that was recently held in Mönchengladbach, Germany. During the meeting, the members of both teams worked on the [27] "New Members" web interface, as well as on long-outstanding cases of NM applicants. The meeting turned out to be a great chance to discuss face-to-face and in person delicate cases and to work on the pending requests. Both teams would like to thank Credativ who hosted the meeting. 26: http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2012/03/msg00014.html 27: https://nm.debian.org/ New Debian Contributors ----------------------- Eleven applicants have been accepted [28] as Debian Developers, six applicants have been [29] accepted [30] as Debian Maintainers, and six people have started to maintain packages [31] since the previous issue of the Debian Project News. Please welcome Arno Töll, Mathieu Malaterre, Johann Felix Soden, Roland Dreier, Dmitrijs Ledkovs, Ana Carolina Comandulli, Michael Gilbert, Carl Chenet, Mònica Ramírez Arceda, Michael Stapelberg, Alessandro Ghedini, David Steele, Khalid El Fathi, Rodolfo García Peñas, Dmitry Smirnov, Sven Joachim, Simon Josefsson, Guo Yixuan, Emile Joubert, Jonathan Steinert, Benjamin J. Scott, Melissa Draper and Lennart Weller into our project! 28: https://nm.debian.org/public/nmlist#done 29: http://lists.debian.org/E1SBckR-0004gS-ES@franck.debian.org 30: http://lists.debian.org/E1SCtPt-0006gV-Au@franck.debian.org 31: http://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 [32], the upcoming release, Debian "Wheezy" , is currently affected by 742 Release-Critical bugs. Ignoring bugs which are easily solved or on the way to being solved, roughly speaking, about 536 Release-Critical bugs remain to be solved for the release to happen. 32: http://udd.debian.org/bugs.cgi There are also some hints on how to interpret [33] these numbers. 33: http://wiki.debian.org/ProjectNews/RC-Stats Important Debian Security Advisories ------------------------------------ Debian's Security Team recently released advisories for these packages (among others): libapache2-mod-fcgid [34], nginx [35], gnash [36], icedove [37], raptor [38], libpng [39], libtasn1-3 [40], gnutls26 [41], openarena [42], linux-2.6 [43], tryton-server [44], typo3-src [45] and curl [46] (updated announce). Please read them carefully and take the proper measures. 34: http://www.debian.org/security/2012/dsa-2436 35: http://www.debian.org/security/2012/dsa-2434 36: http://www.debian.org/security/2012/dsa-2435 37: http://www.debian.org/security/2012/dsa-2437 38: http://www.debian.org/security/2012/dsa-2438 39: http://www.debian.org/security/2012/dsa-2439 40: http://www.debian.org/security/2012/dsa-2440 41: http://www.debian.org/security/2012/dsa-2441 42: http://www.debian.org/security/2012/dsa-2442 43: http://www.debian.org/security/2012/dsa-2443 44: http://www.debian.org/security/2012/dsa-2444 45: http://www.debian.org/security/2012/dsa-2445 46: http://www.debian.org/security/2012/dsa-2398 Debian's Backports Team released advisories for these packages: gnash [47], puppet [48], nginx [49] and freetype [50]. Please read them carefully and take the proper measures. 47: http://lists.debian.org/debian-backports-announce/2012/03/msg00002.html 48: http://lists.debian.org/debian-backports-announce/2012/03/msg00003.html 49: http://lists.debian.org/debian-backports-announce/2012/03/msg00004.html 50: http://lists.debian.org/debian-backports-announce/2012/03/msg00005.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 [51] (and the separate backports list [52], and stable updates list [53]) for announcements. 51: http://lists.debian.org/debian-security-announce/ 52: http://lists.debian.org/debian-backports-announce/ 53: http://lists.debian.org/debian-stable-announce/ New and noteworthy packages --------------------------- 207 packages were added to the unstable Debian archive recently. Among many others [54] are: 54: http://packages.debian.org/unstable/main/newpkg * fonts-dancingscript — lively casual script with bouncing letters and size changes [55] * keepnote — cross-platform note-taking and organization application [56] * kvpm — logical volume manager and disk partitioner GUI based on KDE [57] * petitboot — ncurses version of petitboot, a kexec based bootloader [58] * python-geopy — geocoding toolbox for Python [59] * qtscrob — Audioscrobbler submitter for Rockbox-format .scrobbler.log files [60] * shelltestrunner — test command-line programs or arbitrary shell commands [61] * tabble — program launcher with tabs for X [62] * yagf — graphical interface to optical character recognition softwares [63] 55: http://packages.debian.org/unstable/main/fonts-dancingscript 56: http://packages.debian.org/unstable/main/keepnote 57: http://packages.debian.org/unstable/main/kvpm 58: http://packages.debian.org/unstable/main/petitboot 59: http://packages.debian.org/unstable/main/python-geopy 60: http://packages.debian.org/unstable/main/qtscrob 61: http://packages.debian.org/unstable/main/shelltestrunner 62: http://packages.debian.org/unstable/main/tabble 63: http://packages.debian.org/unstable/main/yagf Work-needing packages --------------------- Currently [64] 432 packages are orphaned [65] and 152 packages are up for adoption [66]: please visit the complete list of packages which need your help [67]. 64: http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2012/03/msg00875.html 65: http://www.debian.org/devel/wnpp/orphaned 66: http://www.debian.org/devel/wnpp/rfa 67: 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 [68] to find out how to help. We're looking forward to receiving your mail at debian-publicity@lists.debian.org [69]. 68: http://wiki.debian.org/ProjectNews/HowToContribute 69: mailto:debian-publicity@lists.debian.org This issue of Debian Project News was edited by Moray Allan, Cédric Boutillier, Francesca Ciceri and David Prévot [70]. 70: mailto:debian-publicity@lists.debian.org
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