Richard Darst posted a financial report for DebConf11. Approximate numbers had been known since last year, but Richard checked all transactions against SPI and FFIS records to confirm that, thanks to the support of the Republika Srpska government, the conference generated a surplus for Debian of around €20,000. This surplus is expected to be reinvested in future DebConf costs.
Neil McGovern, on behalf of the Release Team, announced that the freeze will start on 30 June. That means that no new packages, and no new versions, will automatically migrate to testing after that point. Developers can then focus on fixing the last release critical issues in order to offer everyone a best quality Wheezy stable release once it's ready.
Raphael Geissert widely announced a new mirror redirector service, http.debian.net, that aims to reduce the impact of occasionally offline or out-of-date mirrors, and to use the worldwide network of mirrors more effectively. For now this service is unofficial, though Raphael hopes that it might be used as default in future. You're welcome to test and use the service by following the instructions on its website, and send feedback to Raphael.
Christian Perrier sent a
report
from the internationalisation (or i18n
) sprint
that was hosted by IRILL in Paris last weekend.
Seven people attended the meeting, mainly in order to move some
previously unofficial services onto Debian infrastructure,
including the package description translation system.
It was a success — new servers were configured during the sprint, and the actual
services are now migrating to them.
Bernd Zeimetz published a report from the Salzburg bug squashing party that was hosted by conova communications GmbH last weekend. Fifteen to seventeen people from five countries were present, mainly working on release critical bugs in testing and unstable. About 68 bugs in unstable and testing were triaged, patched, fixed, or at least pinged.
Victor Nițu gave a presentation on the Debian Project, its philosophy and achievements, and the global and Romanian communities: A universal project, with a global community. This is the first local Debian event in Romania after a year and a half of online presence. Fundația Ceata, a local Free Software and Free Culture organisation, supported the community by providing the event location, the after-party, and the new domain name, debian.org.ro.
Stefano Zacchiroli sent his monthly report on DPL activities. May saw the first IRC meeting of the Technical Committee, and they plan to set up a monthly pattern for these meetings, continuing in June. He mentioned his (failed) attempt to reach an agreement with the debian-multimedia.org archive maintainers, and the ongoing Debian for Scientific Facilities Days conference that is also hosting a Debian Science Sprint. Three people replied to his call for help with DPL tasks, and a calendar of periodic IRC public meetings will be published soon. There's still time to apply if you are interested.
Simon Kainz announced the availability of a new service, DUCK — the Debian URL checker, which aims to monitor the Homepage field of packages' control files.
Martin Zobel-Helas sent a request for comments on a proposed policy change for debian.net, a DNS zone where Debian Developers can create entries for their projects.
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.
Six applicants have been accepted as Debian Developers, four applicants have been accepted as Debian Maintainer, and six people have started to maintain packages since the previous issue of the Debian Project News. Please welcome # DD Daniel Leidert, Ulrich Dangel, Hans-Christoph Steiner, Stuart Prescott, Paul Richards Tagliamonte, Andreas B. Mundt, # DM Keng-Yu Lin, Andreas Noteng, Jonathan McCrohan, Keith Winstein, # UDD Andy Hawkins, Sebastian Hilbert, John Paul Adrian Glaubitz, Steffen Rumberger, Timo Weingärtner, and Boro Sitnikovski into our project!
Debian's Security Team recently released advisories for these packages (among others): asterisk, ffmpeg, openconnect, mysql-5.1, quagga, dhcpcd, icedove, mantis, xen, and python-crypto. 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.
393 packages were added to the unstable Debian archive recently. Among many others are: