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News for Debian developers

This wiki page collects small news that all developers should know but that are not worth a dedicated mail to debian-devel-announce. Follow the template "Example of news" and add your news below it. See /Help for more information on how to write entries.

If you are able to post to debian-devel-announce (all Debian members can) and there are 5 or more items below, you might want to send out the news. To send out a new issue, you can use this helper script to generate the email version of this page. After generating the mail, proof-read it, correct any spelling, formatting or grammatical errors and send out the mail. Once the mail is sent and archived, please delete the items that were sent, add a link to the archived mail in the Previous news section and mention the mail in ProjectNews.

Example of news

This is a sample news. Copy it and edit the title, content and signature... You can use links like this. Put real news below this sample.

-- Your Name

Gift qa tag is now an official tag called "newcomer" (⎈)

The gift usertag has been made an official tag, and is now called "newcomer" and is represented by a ship's wheel (⎈). Please use this tag to indicate suitable bugs for new contributors to Debian.

-- Don Armstrong

Newcomer bugs for pseudopackages in how-can-i-help

The maintainers of the package how-can-i-help was recently updated to show newcomer bugs affecting pseudo-packages. If you're looking for new contributors to your team you may have a look at your team's related pseudo-packages and tag the suitable bugs for newcomers as "newcomer". And of course, everybody is invited to install how-can-i-help and help with those bugs.

-- Laura Arjona Reina

MySQL server and client virtual packages

Over the last 6 months, we have introduced a few new MySQL variants into Debian and expanded the use of the existing (but never formalized) virtual-mysql-* virtual packages to supporting switching in/out the different variants.

The wider intent is that all maintainers of packages that depend on mysql-server or mysql-client are encouraged to add as alternative dependencies the virtual packages virtual-mysql-server or virtual-mysql-client.

This will enable the alternative MariaDB and Percona packages to satisfy the dependency. MySQL 5.5, MariaDB 5.5 and PXC 5.5 are all binary-compatible and most likely to work with any program that currently uses MySQL in Debian. If you prefer some of the non-Oracle versions of MySQL, you can even default to one of them using syntax like for example 'Depends: mariadb-server | virtual-mysql-server'.

-- James Page

As-installed package checking

Several tools for checking packages as installed on the system include piuparts (install/upgrade/remove testing) and DEP-8/autopkgtest/debci (functional testing) and jenkins (whole system testing). A lesser known tool called adequate checks packages installed on the system and reports bugs and policy violations. It reports incompatible licenses, missing libraries/symbols/symbol versions, broken ABIs, broken binfmt entries, missing alternatives, missing copyright files, broken symlinks, program name collisions, obsolete conffiles, Python byte compiling issues and more. Please consider checking your packages with piuparts, autopkgtest and adequate before you upload. piuparts from jessie and later will automatically check packages with adequate if you install adequate. Up-to-date wheezy backports of both piuparts and adequate are available.

-- Paul Wise

Making packages secure with systemd service files

Packagers of debian software, who are needing to create systemd service files would benefit from learning from this short presentation detailing various security features you can enable in your package's service files. Many of these features are simple to add, and would greatly enhance the overall security of Debian.

-- Joe Hill

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