Wheezy, registrations and contributions for DebConf11, FTP Master meeting" #use wml::debian::acronyms # $Id$ # $Rev$ # Status: [content-frozen]
Welcome to this year's sixth issue of DPN, the newsletter for the Debian community. Topics covered in this issue include:
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.
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.
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. He argued that fixed freeze dates would
allow Debian's developer base a better planing and coordination with
upstream developers, and underlined, that the first part of the
Squeeze
freeze (blocking library transitions while being lax about
general migration of new packages) was quite successful, and that it
should be done similar in the future. While the time frame for such
freezes (and how
they should be announced) is still being discussed, there generally seems to be a
consensus about time based
freezes.
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.
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:
Squeeze(also backports and security machines was upgraded to
stable);
dak installation (moved from
merkel.debian.org to ries.debian.org) is changed to reflect immediately the
database changes;
Built-Using) in dak and a
related patch for dpkg has been prepared;
Maintainers and Uploaders files (from roughly 15 minutes to about a
minute);
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!
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. Another example of new ideas coming
up during the whole Canterbury Project, was the introduction of the cant package manager (see also
Alexander's
blog for details).
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, thanks to all
the participants for their effort.
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. 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 — many
other ways to improve Debian Blends visibility.
This week in Debianinterviews
Since the last issue of the Debian Project News,
two new issues of the This week in
Debian
podcast have been published: with Jonathan
Nadeau, about current Debian news; and with Roberto
Sanchez, who gives a talk at the Northeast GNU/Linux Fest.
There has also been
two further People behind Debian
interviews: with
\
Bdale Garbee, chair of the technical committee; and with
\
Adam D. Barratt, release manager.
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.
Stefano Zacchiroli has just been \ reelected as Debian Project Leader, supported by 98% of valid voters. Congratulation, and keep up the good work!
Guido Günther sent some bits
from the 4th Debian Groupware Meeting that held
at the Linux Hotel 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 packs. 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.
Raphaël Hertzog blogged about his journey of a new
GNOME 3 Debian packager
.
\ Seven applicants have been accepted as Debian Maintainer since the previous issue of the Debian Project News. Please welcome Pau Garcia i Quiles, Andrew O. Shadoura, Ignace Mouzannar, Hans-Christoph Steiner, Timo Juhani Lindfors, Jaromir Mikes, and Asias He into our project!
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, and 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.
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.
1244 packages were added to the unstable Debian archive recently. Among many others are:
Currently 314 packages are orphaned and 154 packages are up for adoption: please visit the complete list of packages which need your help.
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