Debian Project News - March 12, 2015
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The Debian Project https://www.debian.org/
Debian Project News debian-publicity@lists.debian.org
March 12, 2015 https://www.debian.org/News/weekly/2015/02/
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Welcome to this year's second issue of DPN, the newsletter for the
Debian community. Topics covered in this issue include:
* Reports
* A delegation for the Trademark Team
* Calls for help: Debian Partners Program
* Debian Project Leader Elections 2015
* Events
* Other news
* DPN asks: DSA, what do you do?
* 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?
Reports
-------
Andreas Tille posted the DebianMed Sprint report [1], detailing the
fifth sprint collaboration between the DebianMed team, BioLinux,
developers, and users. The event was a great showcase for the Blends
concept which also attracted new team members. Several packages were
uploaded and accepted immediately at the sprint, thanks to the ftpmaster
team, which meant work could continue on chains of dependencies without
interruption. More reports and information about the work by M. Crusoe
on screed, S. Steinbiss on barrnap, Tim Booth on khmer, and other
contributors is available on the DebianMed 2015 Sprint Wiki [2].
1: https://lists.debian.org/debian-med/2015/02/msg00215.html
2: https://wiki.debian.org/Sprints/2015/DebianMed2015
Debian LTS work continues with Raphaël Hertzog working 14.5 hours on the
project. His highlights include a helper script to generate emails to
package maintainers. Michael Banck [3] worked under sponsorship to keep
PostgreSQL [4] updated for LTS, Ben Hutchings [5] uploaded packages for
cups and sudo, and Thorsten Alteholz worked 14.5 hours uploading new
versions of php5, krb5, and e2fsprogs.
3: http://www.advogato.org/person/mbanck/diary.html?start=64
4: https://github.com/credativ/postgresql-lts/tree/REL8_4_LTS
5: http://womble.decadent.org.uk/blog/debian-lts-work-february-2015.html
Raphaël Hertzog is reducing [6] his non-work related involvement in
Debian. This is partially to change his focus and partially due to
recognising he was being distracted inside the project with mailing
lists, RSS feeds, etc. He has recently been working with a local
political party and the handling of their digital infrastructure, and
specifically voting software.
6: http://raphaelhertzog.com/2015/03/06/my-free-software-activities-in-february-2015/
Thorsten Alteholz [7] marked 154 packages for acceptance in his role as
an FTP Assistant. He also gives his opinions on some emails about
interpretations of upstream licenses.
7: http://blog.alteholz.eu/2015/03/my-debian-activities-in-february-2015/
A delegation for the Trademark Team
-----------------------------------
We welcome the announcement [8] of an official delegation for the
Trademark team. The team worked previously in an unofficial capacity as
volunteers under the DPL and were responsible for Debian trademark
requests and for reporting violations. Recently the team has completed
the process of registering Debian's swirl [9] in the U.S. They are now
moving forward to international marks. Although the team will still work
closely with the Debian Project Leader and Software in the Public
Interest, the delegation means the team now functions on its own in its
responsibility for trademark use requests, new registrations, updates,
and extensions of Debian trademarks.
8: https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2015/02/msg00011.html
9: https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2015/02/msg00010.html
Calls for help: Debian Partners Program
---------------------------------------
Lucas Nussbaum put out a call for help [10] for the Debian Partners [11]
program which thanks and advertises organisations that support and help
our project. The present team has not been able to keep up with recent
requests and additions. Lucas is looking to build a small group in
charge of the program that would be responsible for setting up
contribution levels, maintaining records, and benchmarking the program.
10: https://lists.debian.org/debian-project/2015/02/msg00070.html
11: https://www.debian.org/partners/
Debian Project Leader Elections 2015
------------------------------------
The call for nominations [12] has started for the next Debian Project
Leader election. The DPL term starts on Friday 17 April 2015. Our
Constitution [13] states the elections should begin six weeks before the
post becomes vacant. The process allows interested developers to
nominate themselves and announce their platforms [14] in the first week.
This is followed with a three week period of the nominees campaigning
for the office, after which the last two weeks are reserved for Debian
Developers to cast their votes in the election. The process started on 4
March 2015.
The nominees are: Mehdi Dogguy, Gergely Nagy, and Neil McGovern.
12: https://lists.debian.org/debian-vote/2015/03/msg00001.html
13: https://www.debian.org/devel/constitution#item-5
14: https://www.debian.org/vote/2015/platforms/
Events
------
The announcement has been made that registration is now open for
DebConf15 [15], taking place in Heidelberg, Germany, from Saturday,
August 15, 2015 through Sunday, August 22, 2015. Debconf15 will be
preceded by one week of DebCamp, Sunday, August 9, 2015 through Friday,
August 14, 2015. If you would like to attend DebConf15, please fill out
the registration form [16].
The DebConf Organisation team is happy to announce that they can host
team sprints and take care of any logistics for working space, food, and
accommodation for said teams. Interested teams should contact them and
plan on having their sprints take place during DebCamp, 10 - 14 August.
This is a great opportunity for teams to attract other interested
people, motivate contributors, and reach the larger Debian community.
DebConf16 will take place in Cape Town, South Africa [17].
15: http://debconf15.debconf.org/
16: https://summit.debconf.org/debconf15/registration/
17: https://wiki.debconf.org/wiki/DebConf16/Bids/Cape_Town
Other news
----------
Stefano Zacchiroli pointed out [18] that Debian [19] now has an entry in
the Internet Movie Database, thanks to the movie Citizenfour. Debian is
given "Special Thanks" at the end of the film credits.
18: https://identi.ca/zack/note/uf5PfjXhR1S5JciVOXeuZQ
19: http://www.imdb.com/company/co0504449/
DPN asks: DSA, what do you do?
------------------------------
Debian [20] is a large and global community of a lot of small actors,
projects, and teams. This month as part of a special feature we'd like
to share with you something about a project or a team that is working in
Debian that you may not be aware of.
We reached out to the DSA team with the question: "What do you do?"
Paul Wise responds:
The Debian System Administration (DSA) team [21] is delegated to manage
the infrastructure of the Debian project, including machines, core
services and relationships with donors of equipment, services and
hosting.
In practice, a nine person team gets to work through a deluge of email,
cron output, monitoring notifications, bouncing Debian member mail,
hoster/vendor notifications, spam, weird mail, misdirected questions,
hardware that fails to reboot, dying hardware, sick hardware, serial
consoles, disk replacements, hardware donations, hardware purchasing,
hardware sponsors, hosting sponsors, guest account requests, group
member changes, inter-release compatibility issues, service admin
prodding, security updates, inter-team co-ordination and much more.
Our tools of the trade include Debian stable (and some backports),
hardware capable of running amd64 VMs, entropy keys, ganeti, puppet,
icinga, munin, ikiwiki, git, postgresql, apache, openldap, gnupg,
openssh, bacula, ferm, sudo and a bunch of homegrown scripts.
We are interested in automation, reliability, speed, privacy, security,
resilience, longevity and try to balance these for the benefit of the
Debian project, members, users, derivatives and the wider world.
As we have a lot to deal with, we mostly leave the actual running of
services to service admins but provide general guidance [22] as well as
specific guidance on a case-by-case basis.
Our most recent achievement was modifying the update-ca-certificates
code [23] to allow for multiple X.509 certificate stores and adding
puppet bits to ensure the 3 certificate stores we wanted are consistent
between hosts.
An ongoing project is to replace our current old LDAP web/mail
frontend [24] with a new one based on Django.
If anyone would like to help out, please take a look at and feel free to
fix the various bugs that we have filed [25].
For more information or to contact the team, visit their web page: DSA
Team [26].
20: https://www.debian.org/
21: https://wiki.debian.org/Teams/DSA
22: https://wiki.debian.org/ServicesHosting#Recommended_practices_for_Debian_services
23: https://lists.debian.org/debian-services-admin/2014/12/msg00000.html
24: https://wiki.debian.org/Teams/DSA/UserdirLdapRewrite
25: https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/pkgreport.cgi?users=debian-admin@lists.debian.org
26: https://www.debian.org/Teams/DSA
Interviews
----------
Zlatan Todorić is conducting a series of interviews with FLOSS
developers, starting with Joey Hess [27]. This interview touches on the
life and lifestyle of one of the prime movers in the Free Software
Community. Joey speaks about his life after Debian, programming, and
living modestly.
27: https://zgrimshell.github.io/interviews-with-floss-developers-joey-hess/
Next in the series is an interview with Paul Wise [28], a constant
source of information, member of DSA, and a member of our very own
Publicity team. Paul shares some of his history, his thoughts on FLOSS,
and the future.
28: https://zgrimshell.github.io/interviews-with-floss-developers-paul-wise/
New Debian Contributors
-----------------------
3 applicants have been accepted [29] as Debian Developers, 3 applicants
have been accepted [30] as Debian Maintainers, and 4 people have started
to maintain packages [31] since the previous issue of the Debian Project
News. Please welcome Jonas Genannt, Tomasz Buchert, Federicco Ceratto,
Nicolaus Rath, Balasankar C, Olof Johansson, Rebecca N. Palmer, Thomas
Klute, Luca Boccassi, and Carlos Alberto Silombria Ibarra into our
project!
29: https://nm.debian.org/public/nmlist#done
30: https://lists.debian.org/debian-project/2015/03/msg00006.html
31: 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 [32], the upcoming release, Debian "Jessie", is currently
affected by 112 Release-Critical bugs. Ignoring bugs which are easily
solved or on the way to being solved, roughly speaking, about 67
Release-Critical bugs remain to be solved for the release to happen.
There are also more detailed statistics [33] as well as some hints on
how to interpret [34] these numbers.
32: https://udd.debian.org/bugs.cgi
33: http://richardhartmann.de/blog/posts/2015/03/06-Debian_Release_Critical_Bug_report_for_Week_10/
34: https://wiki.debian.org/ProjectNews/RC-Stats
Important Debian Security Advisories
------------------------------------
Debian's Security Team recently released advisories for these packages
(among others): bind9 [35], libreoffice [36], typo3-src [37],
xdg-utils [38], e2fsprogs [39], sudo [40], ruby-redcloth [41], eglibc [42],
linux [43], samba [44], cups [45], libgtk2-perl [46], iceweasel [47],
kfreebsd-9 [48], request-tracker4 [49], unace [50], icedove [51], and
libarchive [52]. Please read them carefully and take the proper
measures.
35: https://www.debian.org/security/2015/dsa-3162
36: https://www.debian.org/security/2015/dsa-3163
37: https://www.debian.org/security/2015/dsa-3164
38: https://www.debian.org/security/2015/dsa-3165
39: https://www.debian.org/security/2015/dsa-3166
40: https://www.debian.org/security/2015/dsa-3167
41: https://www.debian.org/security/2015/dsa-3168
42: https://www.debian.org/security/2015/dsa-3169
43: https://www.debian.org/security/2015/dsa-3170
44: https://www.debian.org/security/2015/dsa-3171
45: https://www.debian.org/security/2015/dsa-3172
46: https://www.debian.org/security/2015/dsa-3173
47: https://www.debian.org/security/2015/dsa-3174
48: https://www.debian.org/security/2015/dsa-3175
49: https://www.debian.org/security/2015/dsa-3176
50: https://www.debian.org/security/2015/dsa-3178
51: https://www.debian.org/security/2015/dsa-3179
52: https://www.debian.org/security/2015/dsa-3180
The Debian team in charge of Squeeze Long Term Support released security
update announcements for these packages: e2fsprogs [53], nss [54],
linux-2.6 [55], samba [56], openjdk-6 [57], request-tracker3.8 [58],
cups [59], sudo [60], libgtk2-perl [61], e2fsprogs [62], bind9 [63],
unace [64], and eglibc [65].
53: https://lists.debian.org/debian-lts-announce/2015/02/msg00007.html
54: https://lists.debian.org/debian-lts-announce/2015/02/msg00008.html
55: https://lists.debian.org/debian-lts-announce/2015/02/msg00009.html
56: https://lists.debian.org/debian-lts-announce/2015/02/msg00010.html
57: https://lists.debian.org/debian-lts-announce/2015/02/msg00011.html
58: https://lists.debian.org/debian-lts-announce/2015/02/msg00012.html
59: https://lists.debian.org/debian-lts-announce/2015/02/msg00013.html
60: https://lists.debian.org/debian-lts-announce/2015/02/msg00014.html
61: https://lists.debian.org/debian-lts-announce/2015/02/msg00015.html
62: https://lists.debian.org/debian-lts-announce/2015/02/msg00016.html
63: https://lists.debian.org/debian-lts-announce/2015/03/msg00000.html
64: https://lists.debian.org/debian-lts-announce/2015/03/msg00001.html
65: https://lists.debian.org/debian-lts-announce/2015/03/msg00002.html
Debian's Stable Release Team released an update announcement for the
packages: spamassassin [66], policyd-weight [67], and clamav [68].
Please read it carefully and take the proper measures.
66: https://lists.debian.org/debian-stable-announce/2015/02/msg00002.html
67: https://lists.debian.org/debian-stable-announce/2015/02/msg00003.html
68: https://lists.debian.org/debian-stable-announce/2015/02/msg00004.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 [69] (and the separate backports
list [70], stable updates list [71], and long term support security
updates list [72]) for announcements.
69: https://lists.debian.org/debian-security-announce/
70: https://lists.debian.org/debian-backports-announce/
71: https://lists.debian.org/debian-stable-announce/
72: https://lists.debian.org/debian-lts-announce/
New and noteworthy packages
---------------------------
128 packages were added to the unstable Debian archive recently. Among
many others [73] are:
* fcoe-utils — Fibre Channel over Ethernet utilities [74]
* pidgin-gnome-keyring — integration of pidgin (and libpurple) with the system keyring [75]
* tlp — tool to save battery power on laptops [76]
* diaspora-installer — distributed social networking service - installer [77]
* homesick — keep your dotfiles (configs) in Git [78]
* libdist-zilla-plugin-emailnotify-perl — dzil plugin to send an email on dist release [79]
* node-rbush — high-performance 2D spatial index for rectangles [80]
* python3-kmip — Key Management Interoperability Protocol - Python 3.x [81]
* wmcube — spinning 3D object that shows the current CPU load [82]
* libnet-route-perl — portable interface to the routing table [83]
73: https://packages.debian.org/unstable/main/newpkg
74: https://packages.debian.org/unstable/main/fcoe-utils
75: https://packages.debian.org/unstable/main/pidgin-gnome-keyring
76: https://packages.debian.org/unstable/main/tlp
77: https://packages.debian.org/unstable/main/diaspora-installer
78: https://packages.debian.org/unstable/main/homesick
79: https://packages.debian.org/unstable/main/libdist-zilla-plugin-emailnotify-perl
80: https://packages.debian.org/unstable/main/node-rbush
81: https://packages.debian.org/unstable/main/python3-kmip
82: https://packages.debian.org/unstable/main/wmcube
83: https://packages.debian.org/unstable/main/libnet-route-perl
Work-needing packages
---------------------
Currently [84] 664 packages are orphaned [85] and 146 packages are up
for adoption [86]: please visit the complete list of packages which need
your help [87].
84: https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2015/03/msg00042.html
85: https://www.debian.org/devel/wnpp/orphaned
86: https://www.debian.org/devel/wnpp/rfa
87: https://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 [88] to find out how to help. We're
looking forward to receiving your mail at
<debian-publicity@lists.debian.org>.
88: https://wiki.debian.org/ProjectNews/HowToContribute
This issue of Debian Project News was edited by Cédric Boutillier, Jean-
Pierre Giraud, Donald Norwood, Justin B Rye and and Paul Wise.
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