Debian Project News - October 27, 2014
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The Debian Project https://www.debian.org/
Debian Project News debian-publicity@lists.debian.org
October 27, 2014 https://www.debian.org/News/weekly/2014/14/
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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:
* Debian & Stuff podcast
* Debian switching back to GNOME as the default desktop
* Contributing to Debian in other ways
* The Ada initiative and the Outreach Program For Women
* Who is 15?!
* Squeeze long term support reports
* General Resolution: init system coupling
* Bits from the Debian Multimedia Maintainers
* Debian Quiz Game, help wanted!
* Debian DebUtsav'14
* Other reports
* 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 & Stuff podcast
-----------------------
Asheesh Laroia and Sam Erbs have started a podcast entitled "Debian and
Stuff" [1]. The first episode, "Moin Moin Vs. MediaWiki" [2], was
recorded at DebConf14 and contains a little bit of Debian and a lot of
stuff discussed between Sam and Asheesh.
1: http://www.debianandstuff.com/
2: http://www.debianandstuff.com/listen/1mmvm
Debian switching back to GNOME as the default desktop
-----------------------------------------------------
Joey Hess shared [3] why Debian is likely switching back to GNOME as the
default desktop environment, based on preliminary results [4] which show
GNOME coming out ahead in the requalification. This change is also
supported by accessibility and to some extent systemd integration.
3: http://anonscm.debian.org/cgit/tasksel/tasksel.git/commit/?id=dce99f5f8d84e4c885e6beb4cc1bb5bb1d9ee6d7
4: https://wiki.debian.org/DebianDesktop/Requalification/Jessie
Contributing to Debian in other ways
------------------------------------
Vincent Sanders blogged about contributions to Debian and how,
surprisingly, they do not always need to be software related. He
demonstrated [5] this with a project to cool Debian down a bit. The
project shows how doing some behind the scenes work, which may seem
small, really makes a major contribution to Debian, and occasionally
provides that excuse needed to buy more tools.
5: http://vincentsanders.blogspot.de/2014/10/it-is-bad-plan-that-admits-of-no.html
The Ada initiative and the Outreach Program For Women
-----------------------------------------------------
Matt Zimmerman shared [6] an update on the Ada Initiative [7], a non-
profit organisation which has helped create positive change for women
far past its inital goal of supporting women working in open source
communities. Matt asked for and financially matched donations for the
Initiative.
Nicolas Dandrimont posted [8] a call for projects and participants in
the Outreach Program for Women. The GNOME Foundation started the Free \&
Open Source Software Outreach Program for Women in 2006; this year,
Debian will participate and offer (pending sponsorship) up to three
internships. OPW allows applicants to work on any kind of project to
increase the number of women in FOSS. Interested parties are encouraged
to apply. More information about Debian's contribution and an overview
is available on the Outreach Program for Women [9] wiki page.
6: http://mdzlog.alcor.net/2014/10/01/join-me-in-supporting-the-ada-initiative/
7: http://www.adainitiative.org/
8: https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2014/09/msg00004.html
9: https://wiki.debian.org/OutreachProgramForWomen
Who is 15?!
-----------
Today in world domination news [10], we wish you a Happy WHOIS! 15 years
ago Marco d'Itri thought the process of acquiring WHOIS information
should be simpler and should not require hunting through multiple
registries. He authored a Debian version of WHOIS [11] to replace the
BSD-derived version that used to ship with Debian. Marco's version of
WHOIS and his continued work in the background over the years for a
WHOIS that knows which server to query for IP addresses and ASNs has a
database that is often more up to date than the official IANA database.
Marco's WHOIS is now the default WHOIS client on all Linux
distributions.
10: http://blog.bofh.it/debian/id_452
11: https://github.com/rfc1036/whois
Squeeze long term support reports
---------------------------------
Raphaël Hertzog reported [12] on 11 hours of paid support work on Debian
LTS. 23 commits were made to the security tracker consisting of patch
reviews, uplinks, and changes to the list of packages that require LTS
updates [13]. A fair amount of research goes into the effort beyond just
reviewing or triage. He detailed some of the efforts taken to ensure
quality and stay abreast of vulnerabilities.
Freexian's second report about Debian Long Term Support [14] showed that
compared to last month, we have gained five new sponsors and now provide
almost 25% of a full-time position. 39 packages needed updates in
Squeeze, which is nine more than last month. Contributors paid by
Freexian handled 11 updates last month, which gives an approximate rate
of three hours per update with CVE triage included. Given that the list
of sponsors is almost exclusively comprised of European companies,
readers are asked what can be done to convince others to join the
effort.
Holger Levsen's September 2014 LTS report [15] relayed work on the
Debian Security Tracker which he is happy to announce looks good and
professional. Eight bugs were squashed, a backport of dgit was uploaded
to wheezy-backports, and uploads to squeeze-lts were made for apache2,
nss, libplack-perl, icinfa, libstrus1, and wordpress.
Thorsten Alteholz reported [16] 11 hours in September on Squeeze-LTS,
uploading new versions of eglibc, curl, php5, and fex. He also
collaborated with Raphaël Hertzog on a new version of python-django. In
other areas Thorsten uploaded a new version of net-dns-fingerprint [17]
and worked in his role as FTP assistant with 312 packages accepted.
12: http://raphaelhertzog.com/2014/09/30/my-debian-lts-report-for-september/
13: http://anonscm.debian.org/viewvc/secure-testing/data/dla-needed.txt?view=co
14: http://raphaelhertzog.com/2014/10/15/freexians-second-report-about-debian-long-term-support/
15: http://layer-acht.org/thinking/blog/20141001-lts-september-2014/
16: http://blog.alteholz.eu/2014/10/my-debian-activities-in-september-2014/
17: https://packages.qa.debian.org/n/net-dns-fingerprint.html
General Resolution: init system coupling
----------------------------------------
In February of 2014 the technical committee [18] selected systemd as the
default init system [19] for Debian. Since that selection there has been
a multitude of discussions on many mailing lists both for and against
the change. Lucas Nussbaum posted [20] a tentative summary of each of
the proposed amendments in the init system coupling General Resolution
vote [21] that is to occur shortly.
18: https://www.debian.org/devel/tech-ctte
19: https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2014/02/msg00005.html
20: http://www.lucas-nussbaum.net/blog/?p=845
21: https://www.debian.org/vote/2014/vote_003.en.html
Bits from the Debian Multimedia Maintainers
-------------------------------------------
Alessio Treglia posted bits from the Debian Multimedia Maintainers [22]
regarding Jessie. They have been very busy with codec updates, from
libavcodec (which has been updated to the latest upstream to provide for
HEVC, Opus, Matroska, and Apple ProRes) to libeburl128, libltc, libva,
and LADI Session Handler for JACK applications. Included is the LV2
Toolkit and a LADSPA plugin bundle. New multimedia applications include
Advene, Ardour3, dvdwizard, flowblade, Groove Basin, and mpv, among
others. As the overall goal is to improve quality, a few packages were
dropped, such as beast, plotmn, phat, and mplayer. The team invites
interested parties to join them on the pkg-multimedia-maintainers
mailing list [23] on Alioth [24] or on the OFTC #debian-multimedia IRC
channel.
22: https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2014/10/msg00005.html
23: pkg-multimedia-maintainers@lists.alioth.debian.org
24: http://lists.alioth.debian.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/pkg-multimedia-maintainers
Debian Quiz Game, help wanted!
------------------------------
Lucas Nussbaum revisited the Debian Quiz Game [25] based on the original
TCP/IP drinking game with 23 newly added questions. He asks for a few
adopters to assist with pushing the process forward. Readers can check
the current state [26] of the quiz with its posted answers on
collab-maint.
25: https://lists.debian.org/debian-project/2014/10/msg00002.html
26: http://anonscm.debian.org/cgit/collab-maint/debian-quiz.git/
Debian DebUtsav'14
------------------
On October 17-18 at the Amrita School of Engineering, Debian-India held
a "Debian Festival": DebUtsav'14. Despite some last-minute political
turmoil, the event planners persevered.
Pirate Praveen wrote [27] of the excitement and enthusiasm of working
with students who were already familiar with FOSS and in seeing women
participating in FOSS. He also shared his insight into how DebUtsav came
to be created and how this event that marries a Mini-DebConf and FOSS
conference can move forward as a brand and serve as a blueprint for
other organisations.
Shirish Agarwal posted [28] sharing his experience and timeline of the
planning processes that went into the location, hosting facility, and
media aspects of the event.
Balasankar C blogged [29] about the hackfest, the keynote from
Krishnakant Mane, and some of the sessions that took place during the
event. The wrap-up comes with a nice summary: "An event full of FOSS,
Fun, and Food".
R. Harish Navnit described [30] how an email this April about the
possibility of a Mini-DebConf in Amritapuri led to an idea,
collaboration across several teams, a guest speaker, and finally an
event.
27: http://www.j4v4m4n.in/2014/10/23/debutsav-14-at-amrita-a-rewarding-experience/
28: https://flossexperiences.wordpress.com/2014/10/23/debutsav-2014-experiences-day-0/
29: http://balasankarc.in/tech/celebrating-deepavali-differently-debutsav-14/
30: http://harishnavnit.wordpress.com/2014/10/20/the-debutsav14-experience/
Other reports
-------------
As well as the LTS report mentioned above, Raphaël Hertzog's Free
Software Activities in September 2014 [31] included updating Django 1.7
in experimental and pushing for its inclusion in unstable. He noted that
the pace of development on tracker.debian.org slowed down a bit, with
only 30 new commits in the repository to close six bugs. Raphaël has
also been packaging for a new upstream version of Publican, and
sponsoring new uploads of dolibarr, tcpdf, and tryton-server.
31: http://raphaelhertzog.com/2014/10/02/my-free-software-activities-in-september-2014/
Thomas Goirand shared a detailed [32] OpenStack report showing his
activity for the month of September 2014. He highlighted the work done
in the background for the packages Icehouse and Juno (in Sid/
Experimental, with backports for Wheezy). His overview focuses on the
daily uploads, fixes, and collaboration with other Debian Developers and
teams.
32: http://thomas.goirand.fr/blog/?p=207
Upcoming events
---------------
There are some upcoming Debian-related events:
* November 14-16, Paris, France — bug squashing party [33] in Mozilla France office [34],
* November 21-23, Munich, Germany — bug squashing party [35] in LiMux office.
33: https://wiki.debian.org/BSP/2014/11/fr/Paris
34: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/contact/spaces/paris/
35: https://wiki.debian.org/BSP/2014/11/de/Munich
You can find more information about Debian-related events and talks on
the events section [36] of the Debian wiki, or subscribe to one of our
events mailing lists for different regions: Europe [37],
Netherlands [38], Hispanic America [39], North America [40].
36: https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEvents
37: https://lists.debian.org/debian-events-eu
38: https://lists.debian.org/debian-events-nl
39: https://lists.debian.org/debian-events-ha
40: https://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 [41]? Send an email
to the Debian Events Team [42].
41: https://www.debian.org/events/talks
42: events@debian.org
New Debian Contributors
-----------------------
Seven applicants have been accepted [43] as Debian Maintainer, and
twenty-eight people have started to maintain packages [44] since the
previous issue of the Debian Project News. Please welcome Carlos Alberto
Lopez Perez, Guilhem Moulin, Iain R. Learmonth, Mattia Rizzolo, Otto
Kekäläinen, Ralf Jung, Stein Magnus Jodal, Morgan Deters, Tim Potter,
Rémi Palancher, Bernhard Übelacker, Marcio de Souza Oliveira, Petr
Salinger, Eugen Wintersberger, Alexandre Detiste, Cesare Falco,
Jean-Christophe Jaskula, Matthew Bekkema, Corentin Desfarges, Roger Kalt,
Łukasz 'sil2100' Zemczak, Fabien Givors, Reuben Thomas, Jose Robson
Mariano Alves, Pedro Beja, Bruno Nova, Martin Steghöfer, Alexandre Viau,
HAYASHI Kentaro, François-René Rideau, Jason Pleau, Dominik Paulus,
Sebastian Schmidt, Olek Wojnar, and Tino Didriksen into our project!
43: https://lists.debian.org/debian-project/2014/10/msg00040.html
44: https://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 [45], the upcoming release, Debian "Jessie", is currently
affected by 319 Release-Critical bugs. Ignoring bugs which are easily
solved or on the way to being solved, roughly speaking, about 240
Release-Critical bugs remain to be solved for the release to happen.
45: https://udd.debian.org/bugs.cgi
There are also more detailed statistics [46] as well as some hints on
how to interpret [47] these numbers.
46: http://richardhartmann.de/blog/posts/2014/10/24-Debian_Release_Critical_Bug_report_for_Week_43/
47: https://wiki.debian.org/ProjectNews/RC-Stats
Important Debian Security Advisories
------------------------------------
Debian's Security Team recently released advisories for these packages
(among others): icedove [48], libvirt [49], chromium-browser [50],
rsyslog [51], xen [52], exuberant-ctags [53], qemu-kvm [54], qemu [55],
mediawiki [56], rsyslog [57], apt [58], wireshark [59], iceweasel [60],
drupal7 [61], wpa [62], openssl [63], mysql-5.5 [64], and pidgin [65].
Please read them carefully and take the proper measures.
48: https://www.debian.org/security/2014/dsa-3037
49: https://www.debian.org/security/2014/dsa-3038
50: https://www.debian.org/security/2014/dsa-3039
51: https://www.debian.org/security/2014/dsa-3040
52: https://www.debian.org/security/2014/dsa-3041
53: https://www.debian.org/security/2014/dsa-3042
54: https://www.debian.org/security/2014/dsa-3044
55: https://www.debian.org/security/2014/dsa-3045
56: https://www.debian.org/security/2014/dsa-3046
57: https://www.debian.org/security/2014/dsa-3047
58: https://www.debian.org/security/2014/dsa-3048
59: https://www.debian.org/security/2014/dsa-3049
60: https://www.debian.org/security/2014/dsa-3050
61: https://www.debian.org/security/2014/dsa-3051
62: https://www.debian.org/security/2014/dsa-3052
63: https://www.debian.org/security/2014/dsa-3053
64: https://www.debian.org/security/2014/dsa-3054
65: https://www.debian.org/security/2014/dsa-3055
Debian's Backports Team released advisories for the package
drupal7 [66]. Please read them carefully and take the proper measures.
66: https://lists.debian.org/debian-backports-announce/2014/10/msg00000.html
The Debian team in charge of Squeeze Long Term Support released security
update announcements for these packages: python-django [67],
apache2 [68], php5 [69], fex [69], exuberant-ctags [70], apt [71],
tryton-server [72], apache2 [73], rsyslog [74], tzdata [75], ppp [76],
mysql-5.1 [77], and kde4libs [77]. Please read them carefully and take
the proper measures.
67: https://lists.debian.org/debian-lts-announce/2014/09/msg00022.html
68: https://lists.debian.org/debian-lts-announce/2014/09/msg00023.html
69: https://lists.debian.org/debian-lts-announce/2014/09/msg00024.html
70: https://lists.debian.org/debian-lts-announce/2014/10/msg00000.html
71: https://lists.debian.org/debian-lts-announce/2014/10/msg00001.html
72: https://lists.debian.org/debian-lts-announce/2014/10/msg00002.html
73: https://lists.debian.org/debian-lts-announce/2014/10/msg00004.html
74: https://lists.debian.org/debian-lts-announce/2014/10/msg00005.html
75: https://lists.debian.org/debian-lts-announce/2014/10/msg00006.html
76: https://lists.debian.org/debian-lts-announce/2014/10/msg00007.html
77: https://lists.debian.org/debian-lts-announce/2014/10/msg00008.html
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 [78] (and the separate backports
list [79], stable updates list [80], and long term support security
updates list [81]) for announcements.
78: https://lists.debian.org/debian-security-announce/
79: https://lists.debian.org/debian-backports-announce/
80: https://lists.debian.org/debian-stable-announce/
81: https://lists.debian.org/debian-lts-announce/
New and noteworthy packages
---------------------------
964 packages were added to the unstable Debian archive recently. Among
many others [82] are:
* autodep8 — DEP-8 test control file generator [83]
* cgit — hyperfast web frontend for git repositories written in C [84]
* cleo — tool to play back shell commands for live demonstrations [85]
* debbindiff — highlight differences between two builds of Debian packages [86]
* fuse-zip — ZIP archive mounter based on FUSE [87]
* geophar — Swiss army knife for the math teacher [88]
* gimagereader — graphical GTK+ front-end to tesseract-ocr [89]
* gravit — visually stunning gravity simulator [90]
* obsession — Session management helpers for lightweight desktop environments [91]
* parl-desktop — DebianParl desktop for parliamentary work [92]
* pdf2htmlex — Converts PDF to HTML while retaining most formatting [93]
* qqwing — tool for generating and solving Sudoku puzzles (application) [94]
* strip-nondeterminism — tool for stripping non-determinism from files [95]
* terminology — Enlightenment efl based terminal emulator [96]
82: https://packages.debian.org/unstable/main/newpkg
83: https://packages.debian.org/unstable/main/autodep8
84: https://packages.debian.org/unstable/main/cgit
85: https://packages.debian.org/unstable/main/cleo
86: https://packages.debian.org/unstable/main/debbindiff
87: https://packages.debian.org/unstable/main/fuse-zip
88: https://packages.debian.org/unstable/main/geophar
89: https://packages.debian.org/unstable/main/gimagereader
90: https://packages.debian.org/unstable/main/gravit
91: https://packages.debian.org/unstable/main/obsession
92: https://packages.debian.org/unstable/main/parl-desktop
93: https://packages.debian.org/unstable/main/pdf2htmlex
94: https://packages.debian.org/unstable/main/qqwing
95: https://packages.debian.org/unstable/main/strip-nondeterminism
96: https://packages.debian.org/unstable/main/terminology
Work-needing packages
---------------------
Currently [97] 607 packages are orphaned [98] and 139 packages are up
for adoption [99]: please visit the complete list of packages which need
your help [100].
97: https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2014/10/msg00686.html
98: https://www.debian.org/devel/wnpp/orphaned
99: https://www.debian.org/devel/wnpp/rfa
100: https://www.debian.org/devel/wnpp/help_requested
Want to continue reading DPN?
-----------------------------
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101: https://wiki.debian.org/ProjectNews/HowToContribute
This issue of Debian Project News was edited by Cédric Boutillier,
Donald Norwood, Justin B Rye and Paul Wise.
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