#use wml::debian::projectnews::header PUBDATE="2011-03-14" SUMMARY="" #use wml::debian::acronyms # $Id$ # $Rev$ # Status: open-for-edit http://lists.debian.org/$0 # Copyright (c) 2011 Alexander Reichle-Schmehl # Copyright (c) 2011 David Prévot # Copyright (c) 2011 Jeremiah C. Foster # Add other people here # All rights reserved. # # Redistribution and use in source and binary forms, with or without # modification, are permitted provided that the following conditions are # met: # # * Redistributions of source code must retain the above copyright # notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer. # * Redistributions in binary form must reproduce the above copyright # notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer in the # documentation and/or other materials provided with the distribution. # # THIS SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED BY THE COPYRIGHT HOLDERS AND CONTRIBUTORS "AS # IS" AND ANY EXPRESS OR IMPLIED WARRANTIES, INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED # TO, THE IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS FOR A # PARTICULAR PURPOSE ARE DISCLAIMED. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE COPYRIGHT # OWNER OR CONTRIBUTORS BE LIABLE FOR ANY DIRECT, INDIRECT, INCIDENTAL, # SPECIAL, EXEMPLARY, OR CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES (INCLUDING, BUT NOT # LIMITED TO, PROCUREMENT OF SUBSTITUTE GOODS OR SERVICES; LOSS OF USE, # DATA, OR PROFITS; OR BUSINESS INTERRUPTION) HOWEVER CAUSED AND ON ANY # THEORY OF LIABILITY, WHETHER IN CONTRACT, STRICT LIABILITY, OR TORT # (INCLUDING NEGLIGENCE OR OTHERWISE) ARISING IN ANY WAY OUT OF THE USE # OF THIS SOFTWARE, EVEN IF ADVISED OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGE. # TODO: # # * Ruby changes for Wheezy # http://lists.debian.org/20110304085947.GA4250@xanadu.blop.info # Not sure about that; they seeked for "Debian internal comments" but # haven't talked with upstreams, yet, so I guess it's (not yet?) for # publication? # * Report from this years CeBIT # http://lists.debian.org/<4D761A4E.2030302@debian.org> #

Welcome to this year's fourth issue of DPN, the newsletter for the Debian community. Topics covered in this issue include:

The Debian project wins awards at CeBIT

The Debian project won the Linux New Media award in two categories at the recent CeBIT conference in Hanover, Germany. Not only was Debian awarded the Best Open Source Server Distribution for its pioneering work both in the technical field and in the definition of free software standards and processes, but it also won the prestigious Outstanding contribution to Open Source/Linux/Free Software, an award presented by Karsten Gerloff, the President the Free Software Foundation Europe, who donned a snazzy Debian tie just for the occasion.

The full text of his speech has been made available, including a small explanation, why this award is so important: the jury consists of over 300 FLOSS community members, developers, journalists and companies, deciding in a secret vote. So the award is not given away by some publisher, but by the representatives of the entire Free Software Community!

Debian is the most important Linux

IT-Journalist Bruce Byfield published an article analysing in detail marked shares and influence of the Debian distribution. Gathering various data (e.g. the number of active Debian derivates according to ; 63% of these are directly or indirectly based upon Debian) he also lists various specialities of Debian and its derivatives, he comes to the conclustion that It’s not quite true to say that, if you can think of a specialty, then there is at least one Debian or Ubuntu derivative is designed for it. However, it is not much of an exaggeration, either. This was also mentioned on slashdot titled Debian is the most important Linux.

Report from CeBIT 2011

Alexander Reichle-Schmehl sent a report of this year's CeBIT where he has represented Debian joining the booth of Univention, a company who bases its product on Debian. In three days nearly two hundred persons had visited Debian booth mostly asking how to help and join the Debian Project or asking more specific questions regarding, for example, Debian's stanza on LibreOffice or the internal structure of the project and its governance. Also many persons visit the booth simply to express their appreciation for the release of Squeeze, the new website layout and the new spacefun theme. At the booth was present also a Debian GNU/kFreeBSD box, as a technological preview, which has caught some interest by visitors.
Alexander wants to thank our sponsors Univention and Deutsche Messe AG, as well as the Debian folks who help with the booth.

Bits from the Debian Project Leader

The Debian Project Leader (DPL) sent an email describing the aftermath of the Squeeze release. One of the important points in his email is the discussions between Debian and the Free Software Foundation. The discussions touch on the different areas of focus of the two projects even though both projects are working to develop Free Software. The DPL also lists a number of interviews in various places regarding the Squeeze release. There are also some links in the email to talks given by the DPL and clearly he's been quite busy.

Happy Birthday, FSFE!

The Free Software Foundation Europe celebrates its 10th birthday! Congratulations! To celebrate this important date, it is planned to highlight important events in FSFE's history.

Upcoming election for the Debian Project Leader

Debian Project Secretary Kurt Roeckx published the timeline for this years Debian project leader elections. The Nomination period already ended on Friday, March 11th. The current Debian Project Leader Stefano Zacchiroli will again candidate. From Saturday, March 12th till April 1st candidates will campaign and discuss, followed by the actualy voting period from Saturday, April 2th, 2011 till Friday, April 15th 2011.

Geographical based mirror selection as default?

The topic of using some kind of GeoMirror for new installations has been brought up on the debian-boot and later also on the general debian-devel mailing lists. Various pro and cons where exchanged including possible problems with dnssec and different approaches based upon apt-spy or netselect-apt or DNS based approaches. APT Developer Michael Vogt posted some hints, that apt recently got a useful feature for similar purpose added which allows to specify general deb mirrors:// line as source for apt. Just the server side is missing, but that's already been worked on.

New Version of cupt comming up

Eugene Lyubimkin blogged about an upcoming release of cupt, an alternative frontend for the dpkg package manager. The most notable feature: if there's not solution to satisfy the actions requested by an user, cupt wil not only show an error message, but also show why the dependencies couldn't be resolved.

Bits from ARM and Embedded Sprint

The ARM and Embedded Debian Teams had the opportunity to meet up at ARM offices in Cambridge for a Debian Sprint. There are lots of things happening on ARM and in Embedded land. There is an on-going effort to build a new Debian port (named 'armhf') which will provide a more efficient userland, suitable for modern ARM chips (v7), as found in recent netbooks, tablets, nettops and smartphones.

There have also been great improvements in multiple architecture support. Soon we expect to be able to install non-native libraries in our userland, and thus run things like i386 non-free flash on amd64 systems. Cross building support is also being integrated into proper Debian so soon developers should be able to easily create applications on their desktop to run on their ARM devices running Debian.

Inspired by Eben Moglen's vision of a small, cheap and simple computer that serves freedom in the home, we are building a Debian based platform for distributed applications which could help us replace centralized services provided by the cloud. FreedomBox is about privacy, control, ease of use, decentralization.

More graphs for the Debian Bug Tracking System

Mike Hommey added several new features to the graphs of Debian's Bug Tracking System. Beside having per package graphs, it's now also possible to have a graph for multiple packages consolidated into a single graph, or graphs per maintainer.

Further This week in Debian interviews

Since the last issue of the Debian Project News, new issues of the This week in Debian podcast have been published: with XXX, xxx; and with XXX, xxx.

There has also been further People behind Debian interviews: with , ; and with , .

Other news

The 26th issue of the miscellaneous news for developers has been released and covers the following topics:

Yves-Alexis Perez gave an update on Xfce 4.8. The packages for the new upstream release of the desktop environment has been assembled in Debian's experimental branch and he's now synchronizing with release team, when an upload to Debian's unstable branch will possible.

Cyril Brulebois published the seventh issue of the Debian XSF News. He mentions various events concerning Debian's X.org packages, and closes with an impressive statistics: the number of open bugs for X.org related packages droped from 880 in November down to 540 now.

Holger Levsen, Moray Allan and Gunnar Wolf have been delegated as DebConf Chairs. While the organisation of the yearly Debian Conference remains unchanged, the three will now act as liaison between the Debian Project and the DebConf project.

FTP-Master Jörg Jaspert announced an upcoming meeting of the FTP-Team from the 21st til 27th of March in the LinuxHotel in Essen, Germany. He also announced the current agenda for the meeting (ranging from internal stuff like buildd autosigning up to end user oriented services like data.debian.org).

Tollef Fog Heen wondered, if it would be useful to harmonise the naming of flags to enable and disable services via their configuration snippets in /etc/default. Other added in the thread, that one would also better (ui-)tools to do so, or to custimize runlevels. It was also pointed out, that that got a bit complicated after the introduction of insserv.

New Debian Contributors

XXX applicants have been accepted as Debian Developers, XXX applicants has been accepted as Debian Maintainer, and XXX people have started to maintain packages since the previous issue of the Debian Project News. Please welcome X, Y, and Z into our project!

Release-critical bugs statistics for the upcoming release

According to the Bugs Search interface of the Ultimate Debian Database, the upcoming release, Debian 6.0 Squeeze, is currently affected by XXX release-critical bugs. Ignoring bugs which are easily solved or on the way to being solved, roughly speaking, about XXX release-critical bugs remain to be solved for the release to happen.

There are also more detailed statistics as well as some hints on how to interpret these numbers.

Important Debian Security Advisories

Debian's Security Team recently released advisories for these packages (among others): , Please read them carefully and take the proper measures.

Debian's Backports Team releases advisories for these packages: , Please read them carefully and take the proper measures.

Debian's Volatile Team released an update announcement for the package: . Please read it carefully and take the proper measures.

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 (and the separate backports list and volatile list) for announcements.

New and noteworthy packages

The following packages were added to the unstable Debian archive recently (among many others):

Work-needing packages

Currently XXX packages are orphaned and XXX packages are up for adoption: please visit the complete list of packages which need your help.

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 to find out how to help. We're looking forward to receiving your mail at debian-publicity@lists.debian.org.

#use wml::debian::projectnews::footer editor="XXX, XXX, David Prévot, Alexander Reichle-Schmehl" # Translators may also add a translator="foo, bar, baz" to the previous line