Welcome to this year's fifteenth issue of DPN, the newsletter for the Debian community. Topics covered in this issue include:
More details about foo.
The release of Java update 29 from Oracle marks not only security updates,
but a change to the licensing, removing Debian's ability to distribute the
non-free JVM. The clause in the Java license under which we were able to
distribute Java, the DLJ
has been removed. As a result, the sun-java6 package is no longer suitable
for the archive, and has been removed, as documented on
Debian Bug #646524. Sylvestre Ledru
suggests
that sun-java6 installs be migrated to openjdk, the open-source alternative using the
following command: apt-get --purge remove sun-java6-jre && apt-get install openjdk-7-jre.
It's also been pointed out elsewhere
that this upgrade path might not be suitable for all Java programs, and special
attention should be paid to re-testing installed Java applications on OpenJDK.
The SDL packaging team has recently been seriously revived, with Dominique Dumont reorganising the team and Manuel A. Fernandez Montecelo joining the effort. Packaging is progressively moving to Git for easier collaboration, and developers maintaining SDL-related packages not in the team’s repository have been invited to join, too. A lot of old bugs have already been fixed and new SDL 1.3 and sdl-perl packages have been uploaded to experimental. SDL 1.3 brings support for newer OpenGL APIs, input improvements like multi-touch, gestures and force feedback device support, better Unicode support and support for multiple windows and displays.
Stefano Zacchiroli sent his Bits
from the DPL
for October 2011.
He reminds us of the renaming of the New Maintainer Process to
the New Member Process and that a list of
easy hacks
is
a very effective way of attracting contributors to teams.
He reports on his visit to and talks at the recent Ubuntu Developer Summit.
He notes that Ubuntu plan to deprecate their package review platform
(REVU) in favour of converging on mentors.debian.net.
This will need some debexpo changes and also
more package sponsorship by Debian members.
Stefano has approved funds for the recent DebConf
video team sprint and also hardware replacements for
lists.debian.org and ftp.debian.org.
He represented Debian in Parma, Italy at the Linux Day, a
yearly country-wide event organised by Italian LUGs.
He reported that Fathi Boudra represented
Debian at the Software Freedom Day in Algeria.
Stefano also reported on his trademark-related activities, including a contact
point for inquiries related to the Debian trademark, seeking legal advice
on how trademark law applies to Debian packaging activities and starting a
discussion on the relationships between the DFSG and trademark restrictions.
As part of Ubuntu's recent Community
Appreciation Day, Michael Hall sent Debian
a message
of appreciation, stating Without you we wouldn't be able to make the
contributions we do. Ubuntu is great because Debian is great, and we appreciate
all of the work that goes into making it that way.
Michael
will
be joining of Canonical's Community Team, focusing on projects that are
upstream for Ubuntu.
Christian Perrier reported on his participation in the mini-DebConf in Mangalore, south-west India. The conference was held at Nitte MahaLinga Adyanthaya Memorial Institute of Technology and organised by Vasudev Kamath and a team of computer-science students from the college with support from staff, including the college principal, Dr. S. Y. Kulakarni. Christian gave the opening talk, introducing Debian, how to contribute and information about Debian internationalisation and localisation. Later Jonas Smedegaard presented a talk about Debian Pure Blends, focusing on how distributions derived from Debian can work inside Debian instead of outside of it. This was part of his trip promoting Debian and Debian Pure Blends in Asia. The talks were followed on the second day with sessions on localisation, packaging, OpenPGP keys and contributing to Debian. The event was publicised in one of the major newspapers in India, namely "The Hindu". Events such as these are vital to local communities. The participation of "international" contributors in these events often brings more attention on them and is highly appreciated by the local community.
The Debian mirrors team is happy to announce the first mirror in El Salvador, sponsored by the Ministry of Health, with the help of
René Mayorga and Carlos Juan Martín Pérez.
Salvadorian Debian users are invited to update their
/etc/apt/sources.list in order to use
ftp.sv.debian.org.
To quote Carlos Juan Martín Pérez For us, the Ministry of Health, and as
members of the Salvadorian Community of Free Software, is an honour to belong
to the great Debian family.
For other countries, the full list of mirrors
is available online.
There are still many countries lacking good connectivity to a Debian mirror:
interested hosting sponsors are invited to contact the mirrors team.
Discussing the potential integration of packaging teams into Debexpo, the software behind the mentors.debian.net service, Arno Töll issued a call for contributions, since the current team members are busy.
Debexpo is maintained as an Alioth project.
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
three further People behind Debian
interviews: with
Raphaël
Hertzog, dpkg maintainer, book author; with
Mark
Shuttleworth, Ubuntu’s founder; and with
Stefano
Zacchiroli, Debian Project Leader.
Stefano Zacchiroli was also interviewed by Karen Sandler on the FaiF oggcast and by Lici.it. In addition the NeuroDebian team were interviewed by FLOSS for Science.
The xxth issue of the miscellaneous news for developers has been released and covers the following topics:
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!
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.
Debian's Security Team recently released advisories for these packages (among others): moodle, nss, ffmpeg, postgresql, iceweasel, iceape, openssl, python-django-piston, icedove, proftpd-dfsg, bind9, spip, freetype, systemtap, wireshark, puppet, ldns, , Please read them carefully and take the proper measures.
Debian's Backports Team released advisories for these packages: libvirt, libreoffice, puppet, iceweasel, openssl, apache2, libsndfile, nss, Please read them carefully and take the proper measures.
Debian's Stable Release Team released an update announcement for the package: linux-2.6. 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.
XXX packages were added to the unstable Debian archive recently. Among many others are:
Currently \ XXX packages are orphaned and \ XXX 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, Paul Tagliamonte, Sam Hocevar, Simon Chopin, Francesca Ciceri, Jeremiah C. Foster, Simon Paillard, David Prévot, Alexander Reichle-Schmehl, Alexander Reshetov, Justin B Rye, Paul Wise" # Translators may also add a translator="foo, bar, baz" to the previous line