------------------------------------------------------------------------
The Debian Project http://www.debian.org/
Debian Project News debian-publicity@lists.debian.org
December 24th, 2012 http://www.debian.org/News/weekly/2012/25/
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Welcome to this year's twenty-fifth issue of DPN, the newsletter for the
Debian community. Topics covered in this issue include:
* Bits from the DPL
* Wheezy freeze: reviewers needed for unblock requests
* Report from Bug Squashing Party in Mechlin
* 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 the DPL
-----------------
Stefano Zacchiroli sent his monthly report of DPL activities for
November [1]: among other things, he described recent progress in the
work of the debian-cloud initiative [2], the budget approval process for
DebConf13, and IRC [3] meetings [4] of the "DPL helpers", a group of
people who have offered to share the load of DPL duties.
1: http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2012/12/msg00000.html
2: http://www.debian.org/News/weekly/24/#aws
3: http://meetbot.debian.net/debian-dpl/2012/debian-dpl.2012-11-13-18.01.html
4: http://meetbot.debian.net/debian-dpl/2012/debian-dpl.2012-11-27-18.00.html
Wheezy freeze: reviewers needed for unblock requests
----------------------------------------------------
Niels Thykier, a member of the release team, blogged about the progress
of the release process for Wheezy [5]. Wheezy has now been frozen for
almost six months. More than the total number of RC bugs, it is the
number of RC bugs fixed in unstable but not in Wheezy that worries
Niels. This situation is mainly due to "unblock" requests that none of
the members of the release team has had time to respond to. If you want
to help with the release, and don't find any RC bugs to fix, you can
review some of the unblock requests, and help to decrease the number
that remain unanswered.
5: https://nthykier.wordpress.com/2012/12/09/wheezy-release-progress-december/
Report from Bug Squashing Party in Mechlin
------------------------------------------
Wouter Verhelst published a report about the BSP [6] he organized in his
company's office in Mechlin, Belgium. A couple of RC bugs were fixed and
progress was made on a few more. Although Wouter regrets that he was the
only Belgian Debian Developer present, he was happy to welcome local
newcomers who had never contributed to Debian before. Because of this
and the fun they all had, the event can be considered to have been a
success.
6: http://grep.be/blog/en/computer/debian/bsp
Other news
----------
Sylvestre Ledru announced [7] the availability of videos [8] and
slides [9] for the presentations given during the Mini DebConf held last
month in Paris.
7: http://sylvestre.ledru.info/blog/sylvestre/2012/12/12/minidebconf_2012
8: http://meetings-archive.debian.net/pub/debian-meetings/2012/mini-debconf-paris/
9: http://fr2012.mini.debconf.org/
Petter Reinholdtsen blogged about Bitcoin support [10] in Debian.
10: http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/A_word_on_bitcoin_support_in_Debian.html
New Debian Contributors
-----------------------
2 applicants have been accepted [11] as Debian Maintainers and 8 people
have started to maintain packages [12] since the previous issue of the
Debian Project News. Please welcome Rahul Amaram, Markus Frosch, Thiago
Franco de Moraes, Markus Tornow, Gert Wollny, Denis Laxade, Gary
Kramlich, Richard Ulrich, Michael Franzl and Csillag Tamas into our
project!
11: http://lists.debian.org/debian-project/2012/12/msg00072.html
12: 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 [13], the upcoming release, Debian "Wheezy", is currently
affected by 323 Release-Critical bugs. Ignoring bugs which are easily
solved or on the way to being solved, roughly speaking, about 133
Release-Critical bugs remain to be solved for the release to happen.
13: http://udd.debian.org/bugs.cgi
There are also more detailed statistics [14] as well as some hints on
how to interpret [15] these numbers.
14: http://richardhartmann.de/blog/posts/2012/12/21-Debian_Release_Critical_Bug_report_for_Week_51/
15: http://wiki.debian.org/ProjectNews/RC-Stats
Important Debian Security Advisories
------------------------------------
Debian's Security Team recently released advisories for these packages
(among others): rssh [16], apache2 [17], libxml2 [18], mysql-5.1 [19],
xen [20], iceweasel [21], iceape [22], bogofilter [23], perl [24],
libcgi-pm-perl [25], icedove [26] and tiff [27]. Please read them
carefully and take the proper measures.
16: http://www.debian.org/security/2012/dsa-2578
17: http://www.debian.org/security/2012/dsa-2579
18: http://www.debian.org/security/2012/dsa-2580
19: http://www.debian.org/security/2012/dsa-2581
20: http://www.debian.org/security/2012/dsa-2582
21: http://www.debian.org/security/2012/dsa-2583
22: http://www.debian.org/security/2012/dsa-2584
23: http://www.debian.org/security/2012/dsa-2585
24: http://www.debian.org/security/2012/dsa-2586
25: http://www.debian.org/security/2012/dsa-2587
26: http://www.debian.org/security/2012/dsa-2588
27: http://www.debian.org/security/2012/dsa-2589
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 [28] (and the separate backports
list [29], and stable updates list [30]) for announcements.
28: http://lists.debian.org/debian-security-announce/
29: http://lists.debian.org/debian-backports-announce/
30: http://lists.debian.org/debian-stable-announce/
New and noteworthy packages
---------------------------
194 packages were added to the unstable Debian archive recently. Among
many others [31] are:
* drumkv1 — old-school drum-kit sampler [32]
* git-bzr-ng — bi-directional Git to Bazaar bridge [33]
* julia — high-performance programming language for technical computing [34]
* mailnag — mail notification daemon for GNOME 3 [35]
* minidisc-utils — command line utilities for MiniDisc access [36]
* php-horde — Horde application framework [37]
* pixz — parallel, indexing XZ compressor/decompressor [38]
* razorqt — lightweight desktop environment [39]
* sonic-visualiser — viewer and analyser of music audio files [40]
* undistract-me — program to send notifications when long-running terminal commands complete [41]
31: http://packages.debian.org/unstable/main/newpkg
32: http://packages.debian.org/unstable/main/drumkv1
33: http://packages.debian.org/unstable/main/git-bzr-ng
34: http://packages.debian.org/unstable/main/julia
35: http://packages.debian.org/unstable/main/mailnag
36: http://packages.debian.org/unstable/main/minidisc-utils
37: http://packages.debian.org/unstable/main/php-horde
38: http://packages.debian.org/unstable/main/pixz
39: http://packages.debian.org/unstable/main/razorqt
40: http://packages.debian.org/unstable/main/sonic-visualiser
41: http://packages.debian.org/unstable/main/undistract-me
Work-needing packages
---------------------
Currently [42] 528 packages are orphaned [43] and 138 packages are up
for adoption [44]: please visit the complete list of packages which need
your help [45].
42: http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2012/12/msg00326.html
43: http://www.debian.org/devel/wnpp/orphaned
44: http://www.debian.org/devel/wnpp/rfa
45: 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 [46] to find out how to help. We're
looking forward to receiving your mail at
<debian-publicity@lists.debian.org>.
46: http://wiki.debian.org/ProjectNews/HowToContribute
This issue of Debian Project News was edited by Moray Allan, Cédric
Boutillier and Justin B Rye.
Attachment:
signature.asc
Description: Digital signature