Squeeze, Debian linux-2.6 Meeting, new default artwork for Debian
Squeeze, Debian Women IRC Training Sessions" #use wml::debian::acronyms #use wml::debian::translation-check translation="1.6"
Welcome to this year's sixteenth issue of DPN, the newsletter for the Debian community. Topics covered in this issue include:
Squeeze
Release Manager Neil McGovern gave an update for the upcoming
Debian 6.0 Squeeze
stable release. As Squeeze is almost in its final form
he calls for upgrade and installation tests (see also the separate announcement for
that). He also notes that even (experienced) users who have no systems available for
installation or upgrade tests can help by triaging installation reports
and upgrade reports, or
propose text for the release notes.
A report from Maximilian Attems on the Debian kernel group's
meeting at the Paris mini-Debconf in October was sent to the Debian
kernel mailing list. Among the things they discussed was the move to
Git as a source code management tool, allowing the kernel group to not
have to update infrastructure in separate branches as we have to do
now.
The report also mentions the reduction of Linux kernel
patches for Wheezy: Several patches got pushed or landed since
2.6.32, thus state is in general good.
Much more (e.g. about different
patches for virtualisation, the need for automated tests, and Linux Security
Modules) can be read in the
original
email.
Squeeze
Yves-Alexis Perez announced the results of
the Debian Squeeze Artwork contest: the winner is the theme Space Fun by
Valessio Brito. Congratulations!
The new theme has been added to the desktop-base package,
and is already available in Debian's development branch Sid
.
The Debian Women project launched a new initiative to encourage more
people, and specifically women, to contribute to Debian while introducing
them to different aspects of the Debian Project: IRC Training Sessions.
The first session took place last Thursday, and was visited by many
interested people. Longtime Debian contributor Lars Wirzenius gave an
introduction to Debian packaging and was available for all kinds of
questions. The training session is also available as a tutorial on the Debian
wiki.
More training sessions with topics like Bug Tracking System usage
,
Using Git
, and Python libraries and application packaging
(and
many other interesting topics) are already planned
in the Debian wiki.
Debian Project Leader Stefano Zacchiroli sent another bits from the DPL report. He mentions events he has attended (see for example his separate short report about the Ubuntu Developer Summit) and the Debian Sprint program, making it easier for Debian Contributors to meet for developer gatherings. Last but not least he also asks for midterm feedback about his work as DPL.
Alessio Treglia sent some bits
from the Debian Multimedia Maintainers. While also giving a small
introduction to this team, he concentrates on multimedia related features
for consumers as well as producers in the upcoming Debian 6.0 Squeeze
.
Some of the highlights for consumers are a non-crippled
version of ffmpeg and
the introduction of a mencoder package. He also
gave an overview of multimedia production related platforms,
technologies and end user applications.
Rapha�l Hertzog published an interview
with long-time Debian Developer Joey Hess, who's already well known to
Debian Developers for his work on debconf, the configuration system for
Debian packages, debhelper, a collection of
helper scripts to ease package creation, or the debian-installer
(d-i for short). When he was asked about his biggest achievement, he answered:
But while it might sound corny, I am more proud of the accumulation of
all the smaller things done in the context of Debian
. Joey Hess, who
by the way also once laid the base for this newsletter, also gives some
insights about his plans for Debian Wheezy
, what person he most admires,
and whether he regrets having written most of his applications in Perl.
Although Debian supported the
Motorola 680x0 processors from Debian 2.0
Hamm
, support for that architecture was dropped with Debian 4.0
Etch
for various reasons. One of the main factors was limited
support of the C library and other parts of the toolchain. However,
Thorsten Glaser recently started to work on these issues.
He has already made some progress and reports having been able to compile 84
core source packages for a first sort
of re-bootstrapping
.
Luca Bruno reported
on the Italian l10n community. While he confesses that the Italian
language team has failed at attracting new members, he also reported about
quite successful online sprints
which took place recently.
Cyril Brulebois from the X Strike Force gave a report about the state of X in
experimental and also elaborated on dependency handling of X related
packages. Julien Viard de Galbert, who recently joined the
X Strike Force, blogged about his experiences joining the
team. His conclusion? Working on X isn't that hard!
Petter Reinholdtsen noticed someone creating a three dimensional Debian swirl with a 3d printer.
In a recent poll by the German Pro-Linux Webzine, Debian was named as the most important Linux distribution by 47% of the participants.
7 applicants have been accepted as Debian Developers, 5 applicants have been accepted as Debian Maintainers, and 28 people started to maintain packages since the previous issue of the Debian Project News. Please welcome Luis Uribe, Juli�n Moreno Pati�o, Julien Viard de Galbert, Jeremie Corbier, Muammar El Khatib, Julien Valroff, Heiko Stuebner, Niels Thykier, David Bremner, John Sullivan, Bernhard Reiter, Lisandro Dami�n Nicanor P�rez Meyer, LIU Qi Makoto Yamashita, Hubert Pham, Mathias Behrle, Andrew Ross, Sascha Girrulat, Barry Warsaw, Michael Tokarev, Pekko Mets�, Est�v�o Samuel Proc�pio, Roman Haefeli, Massimo Manghi, Ishan Bansal, William Grzybowski, Daniele Tricoli, David Steele, Mackenzie Morgan, Fernando Tarl� Cardoso Lemos, Xiangfu Liu, Sten Spans, David Banks, St�phan Gorget, Arnout Engelen, Samuel Ribeiro da Costa Vale, Rosea Grammostola, Daniel Echeverry, Davi Leal, and Williams Orellana 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
200 release-critical bugs. Ignoring bugs which are easily solved
or on the way to being solved, roughly speaking, about
123 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 an advisory for this package (among others): pidgin (updated advisory). Please read it carefully and take the proper measures.
Debian's Backports Team released advisories for these packages: iceweasel, nss. Please read them carefully and take the proper measures.
Debian's Volatile Team released an update announcement for the package: tzdata. 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.
The following packages were added to the unstable Debian archive recently (among others):
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="Jeremiah C. Foster, Alexander Reichle-Schmehl"