#use wml::debian::projectnews::header PUBDATE="2011-04-18" SUMMARY="Kicking off Wheezy" #use wml::debian::acronyms # $Id$ # $Rev$ # Status: [open-for-edit|content-frozen|sent] http://lists.debian.org/$0 # Copyright (c) 2011 Alexander Reichle-Schmehl # Copyright (c) 2011 David Prévot # Copyright (c) 2011 Francesca Ciceri # 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. #

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

Bits from the Release Team — Kicking off Wheezy

Neil McGovern sent some \ bits from the Release Team where he asks for feedback previous release. He also addresses various subjects that are currently discussed: time based freezes, transitions, release goals, sprint organisation and 0-day NMU policy.

# Removal: Old libs, HAL, defoma

Luk Claes proposed (among other ideas) to continue the \ removal of obsolete libraries and Josselin Mouette suggested to \ start with HAL and gnome-vfs. Even if there used to be some work in progress to get rid of HAL (still used by xserver-xorg on kFreeBSD , Cyril Brulebois mentioned that \ it stalled for now. Christian Perrier also proposed to \ drop defoma.

# NM as default (aka do people even try to understand what, and why, they are replying to…)

Due to \ some limitation in ifupdown, a \ better designed replacement would be considered as a default network manager for Debian. network-manager could be a base to fulfill that mission even if it raises \ more or \ less rational objections.

# Other Release Goals

Among other \ release goal proposals (such as read-only root file system and C.UTF-8 provided by default, Roger Leigh started a \ discussion about supporting /run for Wheezy. # Summarise main points raised during the following discussion? Stefano Zacchiroli proposed \ some more release goals and relaunched the \ time based freezes proposal.

Registration now open for DebConf11 and Call for Contributions

Gunnar Wolf announced the \ opening of DebConf11 registration. Registration instructions are available and the deadline for sponsored food and accommodation is 8th May, 2011. A \ call for contributions has also been sent, and the organizers welcome all sort of submissions: performance, art installation, debate, or anything else can be proposed as well as traditional talks. There will be a poster session this year. More information on submissions of events or posters is available on the DebConf11 website and the deadline for submissions is also 8th May, 2011.

Report from the FTP Master meeting

Jörg Jaspert sent a report from the FTP Master meeting which has been held at Linux Hotel in Essen from 21st till 27th March. During the meeting a lot of work was done, in various areas:

it was done an upgrade of the main archive machine to Squeeze (also backports and security machines was upgraded to stable);
the update frequency of the DD accessible copy of the dak installation (moved from merkel.debian.org to ries.debian.org) is changed to reflect immediately the database changes;
it was implemented a new field (Built-Using) in dak and a related patch for dpkg has been prepared;
it was speeded up the creation of the Maintainers and Uploaders files (from roughly 15 minutes to about a minute);
has been finally completed the project of enabling autosigning for the buildds;
were added binary-all dists files.

Besides, in a discussion with the Debian GNU/Hurd porters it was decided that the Hurd port will stay on ftp-master.debian.org until Wheezy will be released while the alpha port will be completely removed from Debian and the hppa one will move over to debian-ports.org. As a side note, Jörg added that during the meeting Ansgar Burchardt was promoted FTP Assistant: congratulation Ansgar!

The Canterbury Project: an amazing example of cross-distro collaboration

Gerfried Fuchs blogged about the behind the scenes of one of the most hilarious - and well orchestrated - this year's April fool's prank: the Canterbury Project. As you probably have noticed, on April 1st morning, the homepages of Arch Linux, Debian, Gentoo, Grml and OpenSUSE got replaced by a placeholder announcing the merge of all these distributions in a new one. In the post, Gerfried said that the initial idea was to simply do a sort of exchange of homepages between participants. Then the thing happened which the Free Software community is so well known for: additional ideas came in, two people independently addressed me whether it wouldn't be better that instead of a circle replacement of the frontpage, why not display the same page on all of them. And one of them added that a corresponding news item might make sense. said Gerfried. Gerfried revealed also the reason behind the name Canterbury: it was adopted when Alexander Reichle-Schmehl noticed that, accordingly to the related Wikipedia page, the earliest recorded association between April 1 and foolishness can be found in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales (1392). As end note, Gerfried added that even if the all-in-one distribution was only a joke, the cross-distro collaboration was real and exciting and thanked all the participants for their effort.

Report from Med@Tel

Andreas Tille sent a report from Med@Tel conference held in Luxembourg and dedicated to medicine informatics. This year, Andreas delivered a talk titled Benefits of Free/Libre Open Source Software in Health Care (FLOSS-HC): Communities, Collaboration, Development Issues, Technology Transfer", based on a paper written by the Debian Med team: as Andreas reported, the talk was well received and the main impression is that the Debian Med Blend itself is considered as a really helpful and needed thing. But it also seems that Debian Med and other important - and very useful - Blends are little known by the wider public. For this reason, Andreas proposed to use microblogging to better promote the existence of Debian Med and - in the following thread - have been proposed many other ways to improve Debian Blends visibility. 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 Jonathan Nadeau, about current Debian news; and with XXX, xxx.

There has also been further People behind Debian interviews: with \ Bdale Garbee, chair of the technical committee; and with \ Adam D. Barratt, release manager.

Other news

Steve McIntyre made available online a new cdimage search tool that has knowledge of just about all the Debian CDs and DVDs produced by Debian since the Woody release, covering all the official releases (both older archived releases and the current stable release) and the current sets of daily and weekly testing builds.

# Needs to add a link to the result and some stats.

Stefano Zacchiroli has just been \ reelected as Debian Project Leader, supported by XX% of valid voters. Congratulation, and keep up the good work!

Guido Günther sent some Bits from the 4th Debian Groupware Meeting reporting about the group's meeting at the LinuxHotel in Essen, Germany. During the weekend the group has fixed various issues (mostly related to gnome-shell in iceowl), being able to push new versions of icedove and iceowl to unstable and to resurrect the iceowl-l10n language pack. Some work was also done on Citadel, z-push and SOGo.

Raj Mathur sent a report about a large Debian installation in India: the installation has involved about 2,500 desktops and 40 servers, on which were installed Squeeze and Wheezy, and was done in six different locations in India for a large call-out business headquartered in NOIDA. Well done!

Cyril Brulebois published the eighth ninth and tenth issues of his Debian XFS News

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): gdm3, mahara, tomcat5.5, bind9, tgt, tiff, vlc, tmux, x11-xserver-utils, ikiwiki, gitolite, isc-dhcp, dhcp3, vlc, , Please read them carefully and take the proper measures.

Debian's Backports Team releases advisories for these packages: iceweasel, nss, squid3, and tmux. Please read them carefully and take the proper measures.

Debian's Stable Release Team released an update announcement for the package: . Please read it 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 stable updates list or volatile list, for Lenny, the oldstable distribution) 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, Francesca Ciceri, David Prévot, Alexander Reichle-Schmehl" # Translators may also add a translator="foo, bar, baz" to the previous line