Debian Project News - September 3rd, 2012
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The Debian Project http://www.debian.org/
Debian Project News debian-publicity@lists.debian.org
September 3rd, 2012 http://www.debian.org/News/weekly/2012/17/
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Welcome to this year's seventeenth issue of DPN, the newsletter for the
Debian community. Topics covered in this issue include:
* Debian's presence at RMLL 2012
* amd64: primary Debian architecture
* New mirrors closer to Debian users
* Debian translation workflows in a Master's thesis
* 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?
Debian's presence at RMLL 2012
------------------------------
The yearly Libre Software Meeting, better known by its French name
Rencontres Mondiales du Logiciel Libre (RMLL) [1], took place in Geneva,
Switzerland, from 7 to 12 July; Anne Forker sent a report [2] about the
Debian presence there, completing the report [3] by Andreas Tille
mentioned in a previous issue [4]. The Debian project was well
represented with a booth, four lectures and a workshop. At the booth, T-
shirts, umbrellas, Swiss army knives and other goodies could be
purchased. The booth was also a meeting point for fans and contributors
of Debian, a place to discuss computer issues and for socialisation
between conference attendees. Some pictures of the event taken by Marc
"Duck" Dequènes are available on his website [5].
1 : http://2012.rmll.info/
2 : https://lists.debian.org/debian-publicity/2012/08/msg00041.html
3 : http://debianmed.blogspot.de/2012/07/debian-med-bits-report-from-lsm-geneva.html
4 : http://www.debian.org/News/weekly/2012/15/#med
5 : https://photos.duckcorp.org/v/users/duck/GeekAttitude/20120707_RMLL/RMLL/
amd64: primary Debian architecture
----------------------------------
According to the Debian Popularity Contest [6], amd64 is now the primary
architecture in terms of number of submissions via the popularity-
contest package, which periodically and anonymously sends statistics
about the usage of installed packages. With a bit more than 60,000
submissions, amd64 just overtook i386. These leading architectures are
followed by armel and powerpc, for which the number of submissions is
several orders of magnitude behind.
6 : http://popcon.debian.org
New mirrors closer to Debian users
----------------------------------
The Debian mirrors team, together with our sponsors, is happy to
announce three new mirrors: in Russia [7], provided by the National
Research Nuclear University "MEPhI" [8] whose administrators are
"pleased to provide a full Debian mirror to Russian users" ; in
Vietnam [9], provided by MAYCHU; and in Malaysia [10], provided by the
Multimedia University of Malaysia [11]. For other countries, the full
list of mirrors [12] is available online, as well as the experimental
redirector [13] which will automatically take into account these new
mirrors. There are still countries lacking good connectivity to a Debian
mirror; sponsors interested in hosting are invited to contact the
mirrors team [14].
7 : http://ftp.ru.debian.org/debian/
8 : http://mephi.ru/
9 : http://mirror.debian.vn/debian/
10 : http://archive.mmu.edu.my/debian/
11 : http://www.mmu.edu.my/
12 : http://www.debian.org/mirror/list
13 : http://http.debian.net/
14 : http://www.debian.org/mirror/submit
Debian translation workflows in a Master's thesis
-------------------------------------------------
Laura Arjona recently defended her Master's degree thesis [15] entitled
"Translations in libre software". Many aspects of Debian are included,
such as a case study about translation projects and teams in Debian;
another one about "The Debian Administration Handbook" ; and an
interview with Javier Taravilla, a member of the l10n-spanish (Spanish
localisation) team. "The more I see of the Debian community, the more I
like it and it amazes me", she said when she announced her project [16]
to the Debian mailing list. Laura started to contribute to the spam
cleaning efforts, and she plans to help in the l10n-spanish team soon.
The manuscript of her thesis as well as the slides are available from
her blog [17].
15 : https://lists.debian.org/debian-i18n/2012/06/msg00110.html
16 : https://lists.debian.org/debian-l10n-spanish/2012/06/msg00320.html
17 : http://larjona.wordpress.com/2012/06/25/presentation-of-my-master-thesis-translations-in-libre-software/
Other news
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Andrea Mennucci announced that the new GPG key for the debdelta
package [18] is now available.
18 : https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2012/08/msg00702.html
Upcoming events
---------------
There are several upcoming Debian-related events:
* September, 8-9, Dublin, Ireland — Debian Bug Squashing Party [19]
* September, 14-16, Berlin, Germany — Debian Bug Squashing Party [20]
19 : http://wiki.debian.org/BSP/2012/09/ie/Dublin
20 : http://wiki.debian.org/BSP/2012/09/de/Berlin
You can find more information about Debian-related events and talks on
the events section [21] of the Debian web site, or subscribe to one of
our events mailing lists for different regions: Europe [22],
Netherlands [23], Hispanic America [24], North America [25].
21 : http://www.debian.org/events
22 : http://lists.debian.org/debian-events-eu
23 : http://lists.debian.org/debian-events-nl
24 : http://lists.debian.org/debian-events-ha
25 : 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 [26]? Send an email
to the Debian Events Team [27].
26 : http://www.debian.org/events/talks
27 : events@debian.org
New Debian Contributors
-----------------------
Three applicants have been accepted [28] as Debian Developers, and two
people have started to maintain packages [29] since the previous issue
of the Debian Project News. Please welcome Praveen Arimbrathodiyil,
Cleto Martín Angelina, Benjamin Mesing, Andreas Rütten, and Zang MingJie
into our project!
28 : https://nm.debian.org/nmlist.php#newmaint
29 : 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 [30], the upcoming release, Debian "Wheezy", is currently
affected by 454 Release-Critical bugs. Ignoring bugs which are easily
solved or on the way to being solved, roughly speaking, about 264
Release-Critical bugs remain to be solved for the release to happen.
30 : http://udd.debian.org/bugs.cgi
There are also some hints on how to interpret [31] these numbers.
31 : 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-rpaf [32], pcp [33], postgresql-8.4 [34],
rtfm [35], otrs2 [36], and typo3-src [37]. Please read them carefully
and take the proper measures.
32 : http://www.debian.org/security/2012/dsa-2532
33 : http://www.debian.org/security/2012/dsa-2533
34 : http://www.debian.org/security/2012/dsa-2534
35 : http://www.debian.org/security/2012/dsa-2535
36 : http://www.debian.org/security/2012/dsa-2536
37 : http://www.debian.org/security/2012/dsa-2537
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 [38] (and the separate backports
list [39], and stable updates list [40]) for announcements.
38 : http://lists.debian.org/debian-security-announce/
39 : http://lists.debian.org/debian-backports-announce/
40 : http://lists.debian.org/debian-stable-announce/
New and noteworthy packages
---------------------------
Two packages were added [41] to the unstable Debian archive recently:
the installation guides for the two new official architectures
armhf [42] and s390x [43].
41 : http://packages.debian.org/unstable/main/newpkg
42 : http://packages.debian.org/unstable/main/armhf
43 : http://packages.debian.org/unstable/main/s390x
Work-needing packages
---------------------
Currently [44] 454 packages are orphaned [45] and 143 packages are up
for adoption [46]: please visit the complete list of packages which need
your help [47].
44 : https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2012/08/msg00905.html
45 : http://www.debian.org/devel/wnpp/orphaned
46 : http://www.debian.org/devel/wnpp/rfa
47 : 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 [48] to find out how to help. We're
looking forward to receiving your mail at
<debian-publicity@lists.debian.org>.
48 : http://wiki.debian.org/ProjectNews/HowToContribute
This issue of Debian Project News was edited by Cédric Boutillier,
Francesca Ciceri, Simon Paillard, Justin B Rye and Paul Wise.
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