Debian Project News - July 12th, 2012
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The Debian Project http://www.debian.org/
Debian Project News debian-publicity@lists.debian.org
July 12th, 2012 http://www.debian.org/News/weekly/2012/14/
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Welcome to this year's fourteenth issue of DPN, the newsletter for the
Debian community. Topics covered in this issue include:
* New artwork for "Wheezy"
* Reports from DebCamp
* Bits from the DPL
* Debian Maintainer Dashboard, a new UDD frontend
* Interviews
* 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?
New artwork for "Wheezy"
------------------------
The "Joy [1]" theme has been selected [2] as the default artwork for
Debian systems for the upcoming release of Debian 7.0 (Wheezy). The
theme is intended to appeal by being efficient with a light and simple
theme. There is also a fancier variant called "Joy Inksplat" available
in the desktop-base package for those who prefer a more fun desktop. For
the release after Wheezy, there are early thoughts about introducing
multiple themes, more fine-grained theme packages and metapackages for
selecting among them.
1 : http://wiki.debian.org/DebianArt/Themes/Joy
2 : http://packages.qa.debian.org/d/desktop-base/news/20120623T111737Z.html
Reports from DebCamp
--------------------
DebCamp took place last week at the Universidad Centroamericana in
Managua, Nicaragua. This week has been very productive, as can be seen
from people's reports: Christian Perrier described on his blog [3] his
work on internationalisation, localisation and Samba packaging; Joey
Hess mentioned his progress on git-annex assistant [4] and Debian
CDs [5]; Gregor Herrmann wrote about his work within the Debian Perl
Group [6]; Steve McIntyre wrote about his preparations [7] for the six
sessions he is running; and Gunnar Wolf reported that DebCamp has
officially started [8]. DebCamp is followed this week by DebConf12, the
conference for Debian developers, which started with the Debian Day [9],
an open event for enthusiasts, users, developers and anyone interested
in finding out more about Debian and Free Software. The whole of DebConf
is covered on video [10] (which makes many people happy [11]). The
schedule of the conference and the relevant links for the video
streaming are available on the dedicated DebConf page [12].
3 : http://www.perrier.eu.org/weblog/2012/07/06#debcamp-work
4 : http://joeyh.name/blog/entry/git-annex-assistant_milestone/
5 : http://joeyh.name/blog/entry/debian-cd_work_at_DebCamp/
6 : http://info.comodo.priv.at/blog/archives/2012/07/#e2012-07-06T22_59_21.txt
7 : http://blog.einval.com/2012/07/06#debcamp1
8 : http://gwolf.org/blog/arrived-nicaragua-debcamp-has-officially-started
9 : http://www.debian.org/News/2012/20120706
10 : http://www.debian.org/News/2012/20120707
11 : http://blog.debconf.org/blog/debconf12/hl_dc12_video.dc
12 : http://debconf12.debconf.org/video.xhtml
Bits from the DPL
-----------------
Stefano Zacchiroli sent his monthly report [13] on DPL activities from
DebConf12. During this month, Debian joined the FSF campaign on secure
boot [14], and DuckDuckGo sent the first report of a donation after the
agreement on revenue sharing. Stefano also mentions some interesting
discussions for project evolution, in particular the proposals to change
the way DM permissions are handled [15] and to change the policy ruling
the debian.net domain [16].
13 : https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2012/07/msg00001.html
14 : http://www.fsf.org/campaigns/secure-boot-vs-restricted-boot/statement
15 : https://lists.debian.org/debian-project/2012/06/msg00029.html
16 : https://lists.debian.org/debian-project/2012/06/msg00125.html
Stefano Zacchiroli delivered his final "Bits from the DPL [17]" talk on
the first day of DebConf12 [18]. In his talk (slides [19]) he spoke
about the early history of Debian, where we are today, how our place in
the wider free software community has evolved, and our principles; he
summed up by stating that "we play a fundamental role in Free Software".
He then explored the challenges that we face in meeting our
responsibility to live up to our role in the Free Software community,
including keeping contribution levels healthy, increasing the diversity
of our community, being on time with releases, keeping release freezes
short, collective code ownership, low company involvement and how the
DPL role might need to evolve in the future.
17 : http://penta.debconf.org/dc12_schedule/events/881.en.html
18 : http://debconf12.debconf.org/
19 : http://upsilon.cc/~zack/talks/2012/20120708-dc12-dpl.pdf
Debian Maintainer Dashboard, a new UDD frontend
-----------------------------------------------
Lucas Nussbaum announced on his blog [20] the creation of the Debian
Maintainer Dashboard [21], a service relying on UDD to expose as much
useful information as possible about a maintainer’s packages. The Debian
Maintainer Dashboard is in its early days and is waiting for
contributors. In related news, UDD has been migrated to ullman [22], one
of the new machines recently set up by DSA.
20 : http://www.lucas-nussbaum.net/blog/?p=722
21 : http://udd.debian.org/dmd.cgi
22 : https://lists.debian.org/debian-qa/2012/06/msg00085.html
Interviews
----------
There have been "Debian Edu interviews [23]" with George Bredberg [24]
(in English), José Luis Redrejo Rodríguez [25] (in English) and Markus
Gamenius [26] (in Norwegian), who all describe, among other things, how
they got involved in Debian Edu and their views about it.
23 : http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/intervju/
24 : http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__George_Bredberg.html
25 : http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Jos__Luis_Redrejo_Rodr_guez.html
26 : http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Skolelinux_intervju__Markus_Gamenius.html
New Debian Contributors
-----------------------
Fifteen people have started to maintain packages [27] since the previous
issue of the Debian Project News. Please welcome Miguel Telleria de
Esteban, Miroslav Suchý, Georgios M. Zarkadas, Julian Wollrath, Malcolm
Locke, Shawn Landden, Colin King, David Suarez, Chris Johnston, Klas
Lindfors, Alexander Inyukhin, Nikolai Lusan, Adrien Grellier, Ioan
Rogers, and Eric Maeker into our project!
27 : 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 [28], the upcoming release, Debian "Wheezy", is currently
affected by 484 Release-Critical bugs. Ignoring bugs which are easily
solved or on the way to being solved, roughly speaking, about 325
Release-Critical bugs remain to be solved for the release to happen.
28 : http://udd.debian.org/bugs.cgi
There are also some hints on how to interpret [29] these numbers.
29 : http://wiki.debian.org/ProjectNews/RC-Stats
Important Debian Security Advisories
------------------------------------
Debian's Security Team recently released advisories for these packages
(among others): bcfg2 [30], libspring-2.5-java [31], zendframework [32],
libapache-mod-security [33], openjdk-6 [34], and pidgin [35]. Please
read them carefully and take the proper measures.
30 : http://www.debian.org/security/2012/dsa-2503
31 : http://www.debian.org/security/2012/dsa-2504
32 : http://www.debian.org/security/2012/dsa-2505
33 : http://www.debian.org/security/2012/dsa-2506
34 : http://www.debian.org/security/2012/dsa-2507
35 : http://www.debian.org/security/2012/dsa-2509
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 [36] (and the separate backports
list [37], and stable updates list [38]) for announcements.
36 : http://lists.debian.org/debian-security-announce/
37 : http://lists.debian.org/debian-backports-announce/
38 : http://lists.debian.org/debian-stable-announce/
New and noteworthy packages
---------------------------
492 packages were added to the unstable Debian archive recently. Among
many others [39] are:
* dunst — minimalistic notification daemon [40]
* freefoam — programs for Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) [41]
* git-extras — extra commands for Git [42]
* jekyll — simple, blog aware, static site generator [43]
* kde-telepathy — metapackage for installing all the KDE Telepathy components [44]
* kiwix — Wikipedia offline reader [45]
* mountall — filesystem mounting tool [46]
* powerstat — laptop power measuring tool [47]
* scratch — easy to use programming environment for ages 8 and up [48]
* task-spooler — personal job scheduler [49]
* udj-desktop-client — social music player [50]
* wordwarvi — retro-styled side-scrolling shoot'em up arcade game [51]
39 : http://packages.debian.org/unstable/main/newpkg
40 : http://packages.debian.org/unstable/main/dunst
41 : http://packages.debian.org/unstable/main/freefoam
42 : http://packages.debian.org/unstable/main/git-extras
43 : http://packages.debian.org/unstable/main/jekyll
44 : http://packages.debian.org/unstable/main/kde-telepathy
45 : http://packages.debian.org/unstable/main/kiwix
46 : http://packages.debian.org/unstable/main/mountall
47 : http://packages.debian.org/unstable/main/powerstat
48 : http://packages.debian.org/unstable/main/scratch
49 : http://packages.debian.org/unstable/main/task-spooler
50 : http://packages.debian.org/unstable/main/udj-desktop-client
51 : http://packages.debian.org/unstable/main/wordwarvi
Work-needing packages
---------------------
Currently [52] 464 packages are orphaned [53] and 147 packages are up
for adoption [54]: please visit the complete list of packages which need
your help [55].
52 : https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2012/07/msg00089.html
53 : http://www.debian.org/devel/wnpp/orphaned
54 : http://www.debian.org/devel/wnpp/rfa
55 : http://www.debian.org/devel/wnpp/help_requested
Want to continue reading DPN?
-----------------------------
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56 : http://wiki.debian.org/ProjectNews/HowToContribute
This issue of Debian Project News was edited by Cédric Boutillier, David
Prévot, Justin B Rye and Paul Wise.
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