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The Debian Project http://www.debian.org/
Debian Project News debian-publicity@lists.debian.org
May 28th, 2012 http://www.debian.org/News/weekly/2012/11/
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Welcome to this year's eleventh issue of DPN, the newsletter for the
Debian community. Topics covered in this issue include:
* Bits from the Release Team
* Removal of Qt3 from Debian
* Report from Debian Utsavam
* Interviews
* Other news
* Upcoming events
* 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 the Release Team
--------------------------
Cyril Brulebois sent some bits from the Release Team [1]. Cyril
announced that, although the exact date has not been determined yet, the
freeze of Debian 7.0 "Wheezy" has been scheduled for the second half of
June. Cyril also asked for help in fixing the high number of Release-
Critical bugs affecting "Wheezy" [2].
1 : https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2012/05/msg00004.html
2 : http://bugs.debian.org/release-critical/other/testing.html
Removal of Qt3 from Debian
--------------------------
Ana Beatriz Guerrero López blogged about the removal of Qt3 from
Debian [3]: the package was orphaned [4] a year ago and, as nobody has
volunteered to maintain it, is now a candidate for removal before the
release of "Wheezy". A wiki page tracking the status of the removal [5]
is available.
3 : http://ekaia.org/blog/2012/05/20/long-due-to-do-item-removal-of-qt3-from-debian/
4 : http://bugs.debian.org/625502
5 : http://wiki.debian.org/qt3-x11-freeRemoval
Report from Debian Utsavam
--------------------------
Praveen Arimbrathodiyil wrote a report from the Debian Utsavam event [6]
that was held at the end of April at MES college of Engineering in
Kuttippuram, India. The two-day event was targeted at both new and
advanced users, with talks on basic command-line usage as well as
workshops on how to create Debian packages.
6 : http://www.j4v4m4n.in/2012/05/01/debian-utsavam-at-mes-kuttippuram-kerala-2/
Interviews
----------
ITWire published an interview with Stefano Zacchiroli [7], following his
re-election as Debian Project Leader.
7 : http://www.itwire.com/it-people-news/people/54879-how-debian-has-grown-stefano-zacchiroli-speaks-
Other news
----------
Christian Perrier noted that 14 languages are to be deactivated in the
Debian Installer [8] and called for volunteers to help to keep them
working.
8 : http://www.perrier.eu.org/weblog/2012/05/21#di-deactivation-status-5
Christopher Huhn noted that the computer infrastructure at GSI uses
Debian [9]. GSI is a German non-profit research lab that runs a heavy
ion accelerator: they run a Debian-based Linux farm with more than 1000
nodes.
9 : https://lists.debian.org/debian-science/2012/05/msg00110.html
Upcoming events
---------------
There are a couple of upcoming Debian-related events:
* June 8-18, Hualien, Taiwan — Taiwan Mini-DebConf 2012 [10]
* June 15-17, Salzburg, Austria — Debian Bug Squashing Party [11]
10 : http://www.debian.org/events/2012/0608-minidebconf-taiwan
11 : http://www.debian.org/events/2012/0615-salzburg-bsp
You can find more information about Debian-related events and talks on
the events section [12] of the Debian web site, or subscribe to one of
our events mailing lists for different regions: Europe [13],
Netherlands [14], Hispanic America [15], North America [16].
12 : http://www.debian.org/events
13 : http://lists.debian.org/debian-events-eu
14 : http://lists.debian.org/debian-events-nl
15 : http://lists.debian.org/debian-events-ha
16 : http://lists.debian.org/debian-events-na
Do you want to organise a Debian booth or a Debian install party? Are
you aware of other upcoming Debian-related events? Have you delivered a
Debian talk that you want to link on our talks page [17]? Send an email
to the Debian Events Team [18].
17 : http://www.debian.org/events/talks
18 : events@debian.org
New Debian Contributors
-----------------------
17 people have started to maintain packages [19] since the previous
issue of the Debian Project News. Please welcome Jeremy Bicha, Dmitry
Nezhevenko, Jerome Villeneuve Larouche, Mehdi Abaakouk, John Millikin,
Juhani Numminen, Raoul Snyman, Maarten L. Hekkelman, Jeroen Dekkers,
Simrun Basuita, Philip Muškovac, Jean-Louis Dupond, Tom Jampen,
Sebastian Lohff, John R. Baskwill, Alexis Bienvenüe and Kevin Smith into
our project!
19 : 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 [20], the upcoming release, Debian "Wheezy", is currently
affected by 857 Release-Critical bugs. Ignoring bugs which are easily
solved or on the way to being solved, roughly speaking, about 500
Release-Critical bugs remain to be solved for the release to happen.
20 : http://udd.debian.org/bugs.cgi
There are also some hints on how to interpret [21] these numbers.
21 : http://wiki.debian.org/ProjectNews/RC-Stats
Important Debian Security Advisories
------------------------------------
Debian's Security Team recently released advisories for these packages
(among others): iceweasel [22], iceape [23], ffmpeg [24],
gridengine [25], openoffice.org [26], ikiwiki [27], openssl [28],
pidgin-otr [29], sympa [30], sudo [31], libxml2 [32] and request-
tracker3.8 [33]. Please read them carefully and take the proper
measures.
22 : http://www.debian.org/security/2012/dsa-2457
23 : http://www.debian.org/security/2012/dsa-2458
24 : http://www.debian.org/security/2012/dsa-2471
25 : http://www.debian.org/security/2012/dsa-2472
26 : http://www.debian.org/security/2012/dsa-2473
27 : http://www.debian.org/security/2012/dsa-2474
28 : http://www.debian.org/security/2012/dsa-2475
29 : http://www.debian.org/security/2012/dsa-2476
30 : http://www.debian.org/security/2012/dsa-2477
31 : http://www.debian.org/security/2012/dsa-2478
32 : http://www.debian.org/security/2012/dsa-2479
33 : http://www.debian.org/security/2012/dsa-2480
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 [34] (and the separate backports
list [35], and stable updates list [36]) for announcements.
34 : http://lists.debian.org/debian-security-announce/
35 : http://lists.debian.org/debian-backports-announce/
36 : http://lists.debian.org/debian-stable-announce/
New and noteworthy packages
---------------------------
632 packages were added to the unstable Debian archive recently. Among
many others [37] are:
* ffdiaporama — Movie creator from photos and video clips [38]
* grok — powerful pattern-matching and reacting tool [39]
* hol-light — HOL Light theorem prover [40]
* launchy — smart search launcher for installed programs or files [41]
* listaller — 3rd-party application installer [42]
* mu4e — e-mail client for Emacs based on mu (maildir-utils) [43]
* notmuch-mutt — thread-based email index, search and tagging (Mutt interface) [44]
* ricochet — multi-user networked version of the Ricochet Robots game [45]
* robojournal — cross-platform journal/diary tool [46]
* synfig — vector-based 2D animation renderer [47]
* x-tile — tile selected windows in different ways [48]
37 : http://packages.debian.org/unstable/main/newpkg
38 : http://packages.debian.org/unstable/main/ffdiaporama
39 : http://packages.debian.org/unstable/main/grok
40 : http://packages.debian.org/unstable/main/hol-light
41 : http://packages.debian.org/unstable/main/launchy
42 : http://packages.debian.org/unstable/main/listaller
43 : http://packages.debian.org/unstable/main/mu4e
44 : http://packages.debian.org/unstable/main/notmuch-mutt
45 : http://packages.debian.org/unstable/main/ricochet
46 : http://packages.debian.org/unstable/main/robojournal
47 : http://packages.debian.org/unstable/main/synfig
48 : http://packages.debian.org/unstable/main/x-tile
Work-needing packages
---------------------
Currently [49] 425 packages are orphaned [50] and 163 packages are up
for adoption [51]: please visit the complete list of packages which need
your help [52].
49 : https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2012/05/msg01097.html
50 : http://www.debian.org/devel/wnpp/orphaned
51 : http://www.debian.org/devel/wnpp/rfa
52 : 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 [53] to find out how to help. We're
looking forward to receiving your mail at <debian-
publicity@lists.debian.org>.
53 : http://wiki.debian.org/ProjectNews/HowToContribute
This issue of Debian Project News was edited by Moray Allan, Cédric
Boutillier, Francesca Ciceri and Justin B Rye.
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