Joerg Jaspert sent a report from the FTP Team meeting held from the 14th
to the 20th of September in Fulda. During the meeting, the team
implemented a
new
interface for managing Debian Maintainer permissions which will
allow them to deprecate the use of the DMUA flag. A huge improvement was also
made in pdiff generation: in the past the Debian archive provided diff files to
support incremental updates, but without great results. Thanks to a
rewrite of the code, it is now possible to merge older diffs together in
order to have a faster and more reliable final result: users now only have
to download two diffs instead of up to 56.
The meeting also provided the opportunity to promote Ansgar Burchardt to
FTPMaster; congratulations Ansgar!
As usual, the team would like to thank everyone who donated to the Debian
Project, as well as Office Factory Fulda for hosting the meeting.
Stefano Zacchiroli sent his usual report of DPL activities for September 2012: among others things, Stefano continued his work on the relicensing of the Debian Open Use logo, which is now dual-licensed under LGPL3+ / CC-BY-SA 3.0. In addition, Stefano sent a call for help for the Google Code-In initiative. In order to participate, Debian needs both mentors and admins; if you're interested you can volunteer on the soc-coordination mailing list.
Christian Perrier noted that Debian bug #690000 was reported
last Monday, three months and eight days after bug #680000.
This led to some interesting reflections on the decrease in the bug
reporting rate in Debian: according to Christian,
this could
be related to the freeze of Wheezy
but could also be the symptom
of a decrease of the overall activity in the project.
Don Armstrong
sought a confirmation of this theory, analysing
the data from the Bug Tracking System and found that while there
certainly are specific periods of time with a decline in bug reporting,
there's an even more alarming trend of a decrease in bug reporting in
Debian which has been happening since 2006
.
Gijs Hillenius reported that the
municipality of Vieira do Minho, in the north of Portugal, has been running
Debian on its servers for several years. In fact, the administration of
the municipality decided to use open source software wherever possible, also switching
to it for its desktop computers during March this year. For António
Rebelo, head of the IT department, these IT solutions
are flexible, easy to study, test and switch […] and, because of the
lower costs, [it] results in a more sustainable IT infrastructure.
There are several upcoming Debian-related events:
What is the Debian Project?
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.
7 people have started to maintain packages since the previous issue of the Debian Project News. Please welcome José Ernesto Dávila Pantoja, Jerome St-Louis, Vivia Nikolaidou, Eugene Seliverstov, James Hunt, Markus Koschany and Louis Bouchard into our project!
Debian's Security Team recently released advisories for these packages (among others): libxslt, icedove, hostapd, and bacula. 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.
201 packages were added to the unstable Debian archive recently. Among many others are: