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The Debian Project http://www.debian.org/
Debian Project News debian-publicity@lists.debian.org
December 2nd, 2013 http://www.debian.org/News/weekly/2013/21/
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Welcome to this year's twenty-first issue of DPN, the newsletter for the
Debian community. Topics covered in this issue include:
* Bits from the Release team
* A new member for the Technical Committee
* Alioth is back
* Reports from November mini DebConfs
* Bits from the Debian Med team
* Other news
* Upcoming events
* New Debian Contributors
* Important Debian Security Advisories
* New and noteworthy packages
* Work-needing packages
* Want to continue reading DPN?
Bits from the Release team
--------------------------
Niels Thykier summarised [1] the release team sprint, in Paris on
November 23-24. Niels Thykier will join Adam D. Barratt as release
manager for Jessie, replacing Neil McGovern. Ivo De Decker becomes a
release assistant, whereas Dann Frazier is leaving his position as
stable kernel liaison and Marc "HE" Brockschmidt, Luk Claes and Steve
Langasek are stepping down from their positions as release wizards.
Concerns have been raised about some architectures, in particular ia64,
which is no longer considered as a blocker for testing migration. The
release team also agreed that it should be acceptable for most uploads
to unstable to be uploaded with medium urgency, to reduce the delay for
testing migrations.
1: http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2013/11/msg00007.html
A new member for the Technical Committee
----------------------------------------
In mid 2012, the Technical Committee [2], the body in charge of making
decisions on technical disputes in the Debian project, took nominations
from the project at large for a possible new member. After private
discussions, the Technical Committee decided [3] to propose to the
Debian Project Leader, Lucas Nussbaum, the nomination of Keith Packard
as a new member. Lucas immediately confirmed this appointment [4]. Keith
will thus join Bdale Garbee, Russ Allbery, Don Armstrong, Andreas Barth,
Ian Jackson, Steve Langasek and Colin Watson in the Technical Committee.
"I look forward to working within the committee to further Debian's
goals as the universal operating system [5]", Keith said.
2: http://www.debian.org/devel/tech-ctte
3: http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2013/11/msg00008.html
4: http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2013/11/msg00009.html
5: http://keithp.com/blogs/Debian_TC/
Alioth is back
--------------
On November 10, the Debian server vask suffered catastrophic disk
failure. This machine was hosting the storage for alioth.debian.org [6],
the Debian service running FusionForge and giving access to repositories
of many packaging teams. After 10 days of intense work to recover the
data and move the Alioth service from a dual vask/wagner setup to a new
machine, moszumanska [7], the Alioth admins announced that the Alioth
service is up again [8]. Please update your known SSH keys, and make
sure your data is available on the new host.
6: http://alioth.debian.org/
7: http://db.debian.org/machines.cgi?host=moszumanska
8: http://lists.debian.org/debian-infrastructure-announce/2013/11/msg00002.html
Reports from November mini DebConfs
-----------------------------------
In mid-November, two mini DebConfs were organised: one in Wulai,
Taiwan [9], the other in Cambridge, UK [10].
During November 9–11, 41 people from 3 different countries (Taiwan,
China, and Japan) gathered in Wulai, Taiwan, sharing the experience of
using Debian. In this conference, participants had discussions and
learned how to port Debian to an sh4-based set-top box and various ARM
dev platforms. Other topics involved using Debian to develop something
interesting: creating a quadrotor helicopter, developing apps for
Firefox OS on Debian, implementing a browser in QML, Big Data, server
deployment, etc. Links to the videos and slides of the talks are
available in the Schedule section of the wiki page [11].
The mini DebConf in Cambridge [12] welcomed roughly 60 people to the ARM
offices from November 14 to 17. It started off with two days of sprint
time, set aside for focused hacking. A selection of ARM development
boards were available for people to play with. The sprint sessions also
saw some lively discussions on a couple of topics: the status of the ARM
ports in Debian and automated system testing. The last two days were
more in the traditional style of conference session. Two full days of
talks covered a wide range of topics: system testing to git tools,
Debian ftp team work to bootstrapping the new arm64 port, improving ways
of tracking and crediting Debian contributions to dealing with the new
world of UEFI. You can find more details on the wiki page [13] and
videos of the talks are available [14] in various formats.
9: http://wiki.debian.org/DebianTaiwan/MiniDebConf2013
10: https://debconf.org/wiki/Miniconf-UK/2013
11: http://wiki.debian.org/DebianTaiwan/MiniDebConf2013
12: http://blog.einval.com/2013/11/25#Cambridge-2013
13: https://debconf.org/wiki/Miniconf-UK/2013
14: http://meetings-archive.debian.net/pub/debian-meetings/2013/mini-debconf-cambridge/
Bits from the Debian Med team
-----------------------------
Andreas Tille sent some bits [15] from the Debian Med team [16]. After
mentioning talks he gave at conferences covering a variety of topics to
do with Debian and open source software in the medical field, Andreas
points out an interview via Jabber with Rajeev Nair [17], the head of a
health care journal [18]. Discussion centred on the contributions of
Debian and open source software to the health care industry, and how
Debian is at the forefront. This interview triggered the team to
assemble an article [19] targeting readers who are interested in Free
Software in medicine but don't necessarily have an informatics
background. Debian Med is now looking for ideas for where to publish
this article. The team was involved in several events, such as the
Codefest of the Bioinformatics foundation [20] in Berlin, continuing
Debian's contributions to open source software in the medical field. The
team is scheduling a sprint [21] for February 2014 and invites people
interested in developing packages helpful in health care and
bioinformatics.
15: http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2013/11/msg00006.html
16: https://wiki.debian.org/DebianMed
17: http://anonscm.debian.org/viewvc/debian-med/trunk/community/interview/interview_r.nair-a.tille.log?view=markup
18: http://www.healthcafe.in
19: http://debian-med.alioth.debian.org/docs/debian-med-healthcafe.pdf
20: http://www.open-bio.org/wiki/Codefest_2013
21: http://wiki.debian.org/DebianMed/Meeting/Aberdeen2014
Other news
----------
Paul Tagliamonte sent a call for proposals of desktop themes for
Jessie [22]. Contributions will be accepted until February 5. More
information and instructions for submitting proposals are available on
the dedicated page of the Debian wiki [23].
22: http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2013/11/msg00002.html
23: http://wiki.debian.org/DebianDesktop/Artwork/Jessie
Sylvestre Ledru announced [24] that the Debian France [25] association
will be organising a mini DebConf [26] in Paris, on January 18 and 19 in
the buildings of Télécom ParisTech [27]. Please consult the wiki
page [28] to register or submit a talk.
24: http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2013/11/msg00004.html
25: http://france.debian.net
26: http://france.debian.net/events/minidebconf2014/
27: http://www.telecom-paristech.fr/
28: http://wiki.debconf.org/wiki/Miniconf-Paris/2014
Moray Allan sent a call for volunteers to join the DebConf team [29] to
help to prepare DebConf14 [30], which will be held in summer 2014, in
Portland, USA. Moray also indicated that anyone interested in putting
forward a bid for DebConf15 should tell the DebConf team mailing
list [31] and that bid material should be ready by December 31.
29: http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2013/11/msg00005.html
30: http://debconf14.debconf.org/
31: debconf-team@lists.debconf.org
Upcoming events
---------------
There is one upcoming Debian-related event:
* December 14, Bonn, Germany — Debian Hackday [32] in tarent's offices [33]
32: http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEvents/de/2013/tarentHackday
33: https://www.tarent.de/
You can find more information about Debian-related events and talks on
the events section [34] of the Debian wiki, or subscribe to one of our
events mailing lists for different regions: Europe [35],
Netherlands [36], Hispanic America [37], North America [38].
34: http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEvents
35: http://lists.debian.org/debian-events-eu
36: http://lists.debian.org/debian-events-nl
37: http://lists.debian.org/debian-events-ha
38: 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 [39]? Send an email
to the Debian Events Team [40].
39: http://www.debian.org/events/talks
40: events@debian.org
New Debian Contributors
-----------------------
Five people have started to maintain packages [41] since the previous
issue of the Debian Project News. Please welcome Thibault Cohen, Torge
Szczepanek, Beren Minor, Takanori Suzuki, and Peter Roberts into our
project!
41: http://udd.debian.org/cgi-bin/new-maintainers.cgi
Important Debian Security Advisories
------------------------------------
Debian's Security Team recently released advisories for these packages
(among others): libav [42], spip [43], lighttpd [44], torque [45],
icedove [46], curl [47], chromium-browser [48], nss [49], libhttp-body-
perl [50], nginx [51], quagga [52], drupal7 [53], sup-mail [54],
nbd [55], and links2 [56]. Please read them carefully and take the
proper measures.
42: http://www.debian.org/security/2013/dsa-2793
43: http://www.debian.org/security/2013/dsa-2794
44: http://www.debian.org/security/2013/dsa-2795
45: http://www.debian.org/security/2013/dsa-2796
46: http://www.debian.org/security/2013/dsa-2797
47: http://www.debian.org/security/2013/dsa-2798
48: http://www.debian.org/security/2013/dsa-2799
49: http://www.debian.org/security/2013/dsa-2800
50: http://www.debian.org/security/2013/dsa-2801
51: http://www.debian.org/security/2013/dsa-2802
52: http://www.debian.org/security/2013/dsa-2803
53: http://www.debian.org/security/2013/dsa-2804
54: http://www.debian.org/security/2013/dsa-2805
55: http://www.debian.org/security/2013/dsa-2806
56: http://www.debian.org/security/2013/dsa-2807
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 [57] (and the separate backports
list [58], and stable updates list [59]) for announcements.
57: http://lists.debian.org/debian-security-announce/
58: http://lists.debian.org/debian-backports-announce/
59: http://lists.debian.org/debian-stable-announce/
New and noteworthy packages
---------------------------
310 packages were added to the unstable Debian archive recently. Among
many others [60] are:
* attic — deduplicating backup program [61]
* colobot — educational programming strategy game [62]
* diskscan — scan HDD/SSD for bad or near failure sectors [63]
* handbrake — versatile DVD ripper and video transcoder (GTK GUI) [64]
* higan — accurate Nintendo multi-system emulator [65]
* mk-configure — lightweight replacement for GNU Autotools [66]
* zita-bls1 — binaural stereo signals converter [67]
60: http://packages.debian.org/unstable/main/newpkg
61: http://packages.debian.org/unstable/main/attic
62: http://packages.debian.org/unstable/main/colobot
63: http://packages.debian.org/unstable/main/diskscan
64: http://packages.debian.org/unstable/main/handbrake
65: http://packages.debian.org/unstable/main/higan
66: http://packages.debian.org/unstable/main/mk-configure
67: http://packages.debian.org/unstable/main/zita-bls1
Work-needing packages
---------------------
Currently [68] 534 packages are orphaned [69] and 148 packages are up
for adoption [70]: please visit the complete list of packages which need
your help [71].
68: http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2013/11/msg00445.html
69: http://www.debian.org/devel/wnpp/orphaned
70: http://www.debian.org/devel/wnpp/rfa
71: 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 [72] to find out how to help. We're
looking forward to receiving your mail at
<debian-publicity@lists.debian.org>.
72: http://wiki.debian.org/ProjectNews/HowToContribute
This issue of Debian Project News was edited by Cédric Boutillier, Ying-
Chun Liu, Carl J Mannino, Steve McIntyre and Justin B Rye.
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