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THIS NEWS HAS [[http://www.debian.org/News/weekly/2008/05/|BEEN RELEASED]]!

PLEASE DON'T EDIT IT. IF YOU FIND ERRORS PLEASE CORRECT THEM ON THE DEBIAN WEBSITE.


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 Debian Project News

 http://www.debian.org/News/weekly/2008/05

 Debian Project News - June 23rd, 2008
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Welcome to this year's 5th issue of DPN, the newsletter for the Debian
community. Some of the topics covered in this issue:
 * Call for new New Maintainer Application Managers
 * Backports.org keyring package?
 * Debian powers Max Planck Institute 32.8 TFlops supercomputer
 * And much more.


= Call for new New Maintainer Application Managers =

Marc Brockschmidt, member of the New Maintainer Frontdesk,
[[http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2008/06/msg00005.html|sent]]
a call for Application Managers to take care of New Maintainers.
Application Managers should have a broad experience in sponsoring and mentoring of
prospective developers, a firm knowledge of the Debian Policy and
Developer's Reference and at least a rough understanding of the current
New Maintainer process.

Interested Developers, who have above all that a few hours of time each week, should send mail to [[mailto:new-maintainer@debian.org|new-maintainer@debian.org]].

= Backports.org keyring package? =

Robert Milan stated his [[http://bugs.debian.org/480478|intention]] to package the keyring
of the inofficla Backports.org service. This would ease the usage of this service, since
the current approaches to establish a trust path for the package management system is quite
complicate, especialy for inexperienced users. Concernes where raised because Backports.org
is an inofficial service. Robert argued in favour of the inclussion, since it is often
recommended to users to use the Backport service when they are in need for newer packages.

= How to write proper get-orig-source targets =

David Paleino [[http://lists.debian.org/debian-mentors/2008/06/msg00364.html|wondered]] how to
deal with the get-orig-source target for debian/rules files. According to policy, this
target should create the latest upstream tarball, which might mean to export a version from
a version control system. During this proces timestamps of files are included, causing
different checksums, even if the files haven't changed. Calling gzip with the -n switch didn't
solved the problem entirely, but [[http://packages.debian.org/pristine-tar|pristine-tar]]
seems to be the solution to the problem.

= Usefullness of Debian Release Goals? =

Peter Eisentraut [[http://petereisentraut.blogspot.com/2008/06/debian-release-goals.html|wondered]]
about the so called "Release Goals" (global goals which should be implemented with the next
release, but won't block a release if not completed). While they are good to improve the overall
quality of the packages, most won't be noticed by users and most should rather become part of the
policy. He also added that searching for bugs concerning release goals isn't very easy and proposed
to setup an SQL database. Marc Brockschmidt added that such a database is part of a project in
Googles Summer of Code.

= Removing lilo? =

William Pitcock [[http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2008/06/msg00400.html|asked]] for opinions
about the removal of the boot loader lilo. Since lilo had a non trivial to fix
[[http://bugs.debian.org/479607|grave bug]] and grub being pretty stable, he wondered
if lilo is still needed. Frans Pop, member of the team developing the Debians installation system,
[[http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2008/06/msg00411.html|disagreed]]. They would regularily
receive installation reports having lilo installed. Since it needs several steps from the default
installation routine to install lilo, he concludes that there's still demand for lilo packages.

= Report of the BSP in Utrecht =

On the weekend of 14-15 June a Bug Squashing party was held in Utrecht. Thijs
Kinkhorst [[http://lists.debian.org/debian-events-nl/2008/06/msg00004.html|summarised]]
the results, which included testing of the debian isntaller on
various platforms, resolving varous release critical bugs and moving
[[http://forums.debian.net|forums.debian.net]] to an official Debian server,
improving reliability and responsiveness of this popular service.

= Debian powers Max Planck Institute 32.8 TFlops supercomputer =

The Observational Relativity and Cosmology Research Group at the Max Planck Institute
for Gravitational Physics have created Germany's 4th largest supercomputer by using
Debian GNU/Linux. By using Debian GNU / Linux at its clusters, the Observational
Relativity and Cosmology Research Group reduced the amount of work needed on the
hardware and software infrastructure, compared to other scientific clusters running on
other distributions, allowing them to focus on their objective of detecting gravitational
waves. "Thomas Lange's FAI package is extremely useful for automatic deployment of
Debian. For example, without much tweaking and using only two hosts, we were able
to reinstall the cluster in about 2.5 hours and were only limited by those two servers'
network connection.", said Dr. Aulbert, one of the cluster designers.

A more detailed report is availabe on [[http://times.debian.net/#1250|Debian Time]].

= Other News =

Brice Goglin sent a [[http://bgoglin.livejournal.com/15598.html|report]] from the
X strike force concerning the upcoming stable release. Since Xorg 7.4 and Xserver 1.5
which were scheduled for this years February are late, they won't make it into the upcoming
stable release, which will be shipped with Xorg 7.3 and Xserver 1.4.2.

Luca Capello [[http://lists.debian.org/debian-events-eu/2008/06/msg00009.html|wrote a report]]
about Debians presence at LinuxDays 2008. Members of the project present Debian at a small
booth and got asked different kinds of questions, ranging from technical ones to philosophical ones.

[[http://edos.debian.net/weather/|Debian weather]], an inofficial service intended as quick overview
about the state of the archive on a specific architecture, is [[http://upsilon.cc/~zack/blog/posts/2008/06/debian_weather_is_back/|back online]].

Obey Arthur Liu gave a small impression on his
[[http://www.milliways.fr/2008/06/21/state-of-the-aptitude/|gtk frontend for aptitude]].

Peter Samuelson uploaded the recently released version 1.5.0 of Subversion, a popular version
control system, to the experimenal archive. He asks for
[[http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2008/06/msg00560.html|aggresive testing]] so Debian might
be able to ship the upcoming release for Subversion 1.5.0.


= Important Debian Security Advisories =

Debian's Security Team released among others advisories for the packages [[http://www.debian.org/security/2008/dsa-1595|xorg-server]] and
[[http://www.debian.org/security/2008/dsa-1596|typo3]].
Please read them carefully and take the proper measures.

Please note, that those are only the most important security advisories of the last
two weeks. If you would like to be always up to date regarding security advisories
released by the Debian Security Team, please subscribe to the
[[http://lists.debian.org/debian-security-announce/|our mailing list for security announcements.]]


= Work-needed packages =
Currently 453 packages are orphaned and 111 packages are up for adoption. Please take a look
at the recent
[[http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2008/06/msg00301.html|report]] if there are packages
you are interested in or view the complete archive of packages requesting
[[http://www.debian.org/devel/wnpp/help_requested|help]].

Want to continue reading DPN? Please help us create this newsletter.
We still need more volunteer writers who watch the Debian community
and report about what is going on. Please see the
[[ProjectNews/HowToContribute|contributing page]] to find out how to
help. We're looking forward to receiving your mail at
debian-publicity@lists.debian.org.


'''Mention who has contributed here'''

Stefano Zacchiroli, Ana Guerrero, Thomas Lange, Andre Felipe Machado, Meike Reichle and Alexander Schmehl contributed to this issue of the Debian
Project News.


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CategoryProjectNews