The Debian project has just reelected Stefano Zacchiroli for a third year as Debian Project Leader. More than 80% of voters put him as their first choice (or equal first) on their ballot papers.
Stefano's large majority over his opponents shows how satisfied the Debian project is with his work so far, and its wish for him to represent the project during one last term — Stefano has already announced he won't be seeking reelection again next year. Wouter Verhelst and Gergely Nagy also gained a lot of support from Debian project members, both coming hundreds of votes ahead of the "None of the above" ballot choice.
The Debian project is pleased to announce that registration is now open for the DebConf12 conference, which will take place in Managua, Nicaragua, from Sunday 8 July to Saturday 14 July 2012. The conference will be preceded as usual by a week-long DebCamp, from Sunday 1 July to Saturday 7 July. It will only be possible to apply for food and accommodation grants and/or travel grants until 15 May.
Debian also invites submissions of proposals for papers, presentations, discussion sessions and tutorials for DebConf12 until 1 June 2012.
We usually give information about BSPs where a group of people meet over a weekend, but today we'd like to mention two personal initiatives. Gregor Herrmann has reported every week over ten Release-Critical bugs squashed. Gerfried Fuchs also regularly reports on stable Release-Critical bugs squashed, and has managed to squash over thirty bugs each month. We would like to thank Gregor Herrmann, Gerfried Fuchs and all other RC bug addicts who are constantly helping to make our distribution better.
Philipp Kern posted an update on the current state of the Debian s390x port. Work started on this port last summer, during DebConf11, and in less than a month it already had almost 65% of packages built. Unfortunately, a new GLib release created some problems on this architecture; but recently a new major release of GLib fixed all the issues. The next steps for this port will be to fix open bugs and to make Iceweasel build successfully.
Raphaël Hertzog published a People behind Debian
interview with
Francesca
Ciceri, a member of the Debian press and publicity teams, while
Petter Reinholdtsen interviewed
Wolfgang
Schweer,
Justin
B Rye and
Andreas
Mundt for his Debian Edu interviews
series.
Guido Günther sent out some
bits
from the fifth Debian Groupware Meeting,
which was held at the Linux Hotel in Essen, Germany.
During the weekend the group fixed various issues and was able to
push new versions of icedove
and d-push to unstable
while iceowl (dead upstream)
remains in experimental
.
Some work was also done on OpenChange, Zarafa ZCP and SOGo, and several
evolution
bugs were worked on.
Michael Larabel did some benchmarks to compare Debian GNU/kFreeBSD, Debian GNU/Linux and FreeBSD/PC-BSD 9.0 on a dual AMD Opteron 2384 system with 4 GB of RAM and a 160 GB Western Digital SATA drive. It appears that Linux is generally faster than kFreeBSD for now, but kFreeBSD won on a few tests. For more details, you can consult the complete results page.
Sebastian Harl called for help with handling the Debian booth at the Grazer Linuxtage. If you are interested in helping out, please add yourself to the wiki page.
Mònica Ramírez Arceda wrote a useful tutorial for new Debian Developers where she explained the useful configuration changes people may want to apply just after they become DDs.
There are several upcoming Debian-related events:
You can find more information about Debian-related events and talks on the events section of the Debian web site, or subscribe to one of our events mailing lists for different regions: Europe, Netherlands, Hispanic America, North America.
Do you want to organise a Debian booth or a Debian install party? Are you aware of other upcoming Debian-related events? Have you delivered a Debian talk that you want to link on our talks page? Send an email to the Debian Events Team.
Five people have started to maintain packages since the previous issue of the Debian Project News. Please welcome Mike Miller, Elena Grandi, Pierre Chambart, Prach Pongpanich and Corentin Labbe into our project!
Debian's Security Team recently released advisories for these packages (among others): libpng, tiff, inspircd, sqlalchemy, samba and puppet. 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) for announcements.
282 packages were added to the unstable Debian archive recently. Among many others are: