Build itevent report, why attend DebConf, making
testinguser-oriented" #use wml::debian::translation-check translation="1.3"
Welcome to this year's eighth issue of DPN, the newsletter for the Debian community. Topics covered in this issue include:
The DebConf organization team released the final report of the 2010 Debian
Conference, which was held in New York City, USA, at Columbia University.
According to the DebConf blog
entry, It's a 46-page document which gives the reader an idea about the
conference as a whole. It includes descriptions of talks, DebCamp and Debian
Day activities, personal impressions, attendee and budgeting numbers, the work
of various teams, social events, funny pictures and so on.
There are two PDF versions of the final report available, which can be
downloaded from the DebConf Media
website.
The Debian Project's \
debian.org and debian.net domains are now
secured by the DNS Security Extensions (DNSSEC).
This enables users with security aware DNS resolvers to
securely retrieve information from the domain name system
.
Build itevent report
Margarita Manterola sent a report
of the Build
it
event organized by the Debian Women project in collaboration
with the Open Hatch project and held on the #debian-women IRC
channel on Saturday May 7.
Both the sessions — scheduled at 11:00 UTC and 22:00 UTC to fit different
timezones — went very well with an audience of at least ten to fifteen
attendees. \
A log is available for those who couldn't be present at the
event, as well as a Building Tutorial
based on the log and already translated into Spanish — volunteers welcome
for further translations!
As noted by Kipngetich Ibrahim Ngeno, the Debian group on Identi.ca has reached 10,000 members. Beside the Debian group, founded on January 2009, there is also an official Debian account (from which various news items and announcements are broadcast) and some accounts and groups for specific teams.
The latest official Identi.ca Debian team account is the Debian Women account.
Jörg Jaspert announced the \
removal of the alpha and hppa ports from ftp-master.debian.org.
Users of either of these two architectures should ensure that their sources.list
entries point to the new location of alpha
and hppa
ports, except for Lenny
users, since these architectures will
still be officially supported until its End Of Life.
Stefano Zacchiroli wrote an \
interesting post about DebConf11 that explains why it
is a truly FOSS event: there is no event organizer
company
behind DebConf — all the work is done by volunteers (the
DebConf Team). Also, a major part of the value of DebConf itself
derives from the program which is created by all DebConf participants by
submitting proposals for talks, BoFs, contests, and so on. To quote
Stefano: Are you going to DebConf and willing to attend a conference
with a great program? Great, then start submitting a great event
yourself!
.
In addition, this year the Debian Project is inviting newbies and non-regular attendees to come to DebConf. For these two categories of participants an extra travel fund will be available. Any Debian Developer or Maintainer who has never been to DebConf, or who last participated in 2007 or before, can apply for this special funding. To put forward your request, or to recommend other members of the Project, send an email to the DebConf Newbies Team before June 18, including an estimate of travel costs, where you are leaving from, the amount you will not be able to fund yourself, and the dates of arrival and leaving. If you plan to participate in DebConf, don't forget to register via the DebConf registration system.
testinguser-oriented
After the CUT proposal, a new word
popped up in the discussion aiming to make testing
user-oriented:
\
rolling.
Even though some people \
objected or even \
laughed at first, others tried to \
gather the main ideas and began to propose serious \
mechanisms for implementing them.
The various proposals are still up for discussion.
One of the main interesting goals would be to provide more up to date
software to our users, allowing them to provide earlier feedback
before stable
is released; and one of the biggest perceived risks is that
developers may lose focus on the stable
release itself.
There actually could be some solutions to provide rolling
as a pseudo-suite, avoiding disruption to the release process and
allowing developers to bypass the testing
migration process to
provide fixes in rolling
directly.
Since the last issue of the Debian Project News, a
new issue of the This week in
Debian
podcast has been published: with
Phillip
Newborough, from the CrunchBang distribution.
There has also been one further People behind Debian
interview: with
Steve
Langasek, release wizard and member of the technical committee.
Ana Guerrero mentioned that \ Qt3 is looking for new maintainers. You're invited to \ step up to adopt it or help to figure out \ what to do with packages depending on Qt3.
Fernando González de Requena Redondo, who has spent the last
two years carrying out an \
ethnographic survey of Debian, presented
a master thesis on the subject: The spaces of community: a
preliminary ethnographic study on the Debian Project
.
His \
more than 150-page report (in Spanish) is available
from the institutional repository of the UNED.
Florian Weimer noted that people no longer use \
corporate accounts to send mails to the Debian project mailing list,
as they did in the past, wondering if it results from corporate pressure
or mailing list policy. Russ Allbery replied that it is probably a matter
of the \
ease of getting a personal mailbox and of the increased
awareness — compared to ten years ago — of on-line identity.
Tony Travis added that he prefers to use a private email address
to have the \
freedom to express opinions which could be in conflict with
corporate
policy.
Martin Zobel-Helas wondered if Debian should implement RFC4941 as
default for the next stable release, Wheezy
. RFC4941 describes an
extension to IPv6 stateless address autoconfiguration for interfaces whose
interface identifier is derived from an IEEE identifier; without this,
IPv6 configured via router advertisement uses the hardware address of the
Ethernet card to determine the IPv6 address, raising privacy issues as
users could be tracked via their devices.
7 applicants have been accepted as Debian Maintainers and 11 people have started to maintain packages since the previous issue of the Debian Project News. Please welcome Liang Guo, Nicolas Boulenguez, Nicolas Lopez de Lerma Aymerich, Olivier Sallou, Sven Eckelmann, Thomas Krennwallner, YunQiang Su, Alexander Holupirek, Vsevolod Velichko, Emilien Klein, Ming-Ting Yao Wei, Tobias Hansen, Torquil Macdonald Sørensen, Madhu Donepudi, Stephan Gerhard, Stefan Tomanek, Vladimir Kotov and Tobias Winchen into our project!
Debian's Security Team recently released advisories for these packages (among others): otrs2, exim4, postfix, zodb, icedove, exim4, and apr. Please read them carefully and take the proper measures.
Debian's Backports Team released advisories for these packages: iceweasel and exim4 (twice). Please read them carefully and take the proper measures.
Debian's Stable Release Team released advisories for these packages: clive and pianobar. 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 or volatile
list, for Lenny
, the oldstable distribution) for announcements.
270 packages were added to the unstable Debian archive recently. Among many others are:
Currently \ 301 packages are orphaned and \ 145 packages are up for adoption: please visit the complete list of packages which need your help.
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="Tiago Bortoletto Vaz, Mark Caglienzi, Francesca Ciceri, Jeremiah C. Foster, David Prévot, Alexander Reichle-Schmehl, Alexander Reshetov, Justin B. Rye" # Translators may also add a translator="foo, bar, baz" to the previous line