#use wml::debian::projectnews::header PUBDATE="2010-08-23" SUMMARY="" #use wml::debian::acronyms

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

Screenshots at packages.debian.org

As it is often easier to get an impression of an application by looking at screenshots, instead of just reading a descriptive text, Gerfried Rhonda Fuchs has integrated the screenshots.debian.net service into the package information at packages.debian.org. See for example the screenshot of the package extremetuxracer.

For packages that do not yet have a screenshot available, a placeholder image is shown. Users are encouraged to contribute by uploading their own screenshots for their favourite applications.

Some Bits from ARM porters

Riku Voipio published some unofficial Bits from the ARM porters in which he thanked ARM and Canonical for sponsoring new machines for the project. Besides giving Debian Contributors a three times faster machine for their devolopment work, it has allowed the buildd infrastructure of machines automatically building new packages for specific architectures and suites to be renewed, so that experimental packages, volatile packages, non-free packages and packages from backports.org are now automatically built as well. Finally, he announced some work being done on a Hardfloat ARM port, which will work better on newer ARM processors with a hardware floating-point unit.

Join the DebConf Team

Richard Darst started a series of blogs about the organisation of the annual Debian Conference by commenting on the recent DebConf & Debian discussion. He doesn't see a difference between the two, and invites all interested people to join the organisation team by subscribing to the DebConf team mailing list and joining the #debconf-team IRC channel on irc.debian.org.

Other news

Valessio Brito wondered, wether a webchat similar to the one used during the last Debian Conference should be permanently available, to make it easier for users unfamiliar with irc to join.

Martin Zobel-Helas noted that now more than 50% of Debian's hosts and public services are reachable over IPv6.

New Developers and Maintainers

XXX applicants have been accepted as Debian Developers and XXX applicants has been accepted as Debian Maintainer 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 unofficial release-citical bug counter, the upcoming release, Debian 6.0 Squeeze, is currently affected by 302 release-critical bugs. Ignoring bugs which are easily solved or on the way to being solved, roughly speaking, about 128 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 interprete these numbers.

Important Debian Security Advisories

Debian's Security Team recently released advisories for these packages (among others): squirrelmail, lxr-cvs, smarty (update), ghostscripty, and Linux 2.6.26. 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 for announcements.

New and noteworthy packages

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

Work-needing packages

Currently 576 packages are orphaned and 135 packages are up for adoption. Please take a look at the recent reports to see if there are packages you are interested in or view 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, Alexander Reichle-Schmehl"