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Welcome to this year's 16th issue of DPN, the newsletter for the Debian community. Topics covered in this issue include:

TODO:

GNU Affero General Public License suitable for Debian "main"

Joerg Jaspert, representing FTP master team, has released a [http://lists.debian.org/debian-legal/2008/11/msg00097.html position statement] about inclusion of works licensed under [http://www.fsf.org/licensing/licenses/agpl-3.0.html GNU Affero General Public License version 3] (AGPLv3) in main. In short, the statement says that such work are suitable for Debian/main, even though the AGPL has an additional clause compared to the [http://www.fsf.org/licensing/licenses/gpl-3.0.html GNU General Public License] (GPLv3), requiring a software to offer the source code when to a user interacting with it remotely through a computer network.

Security Teams Meeting in Essen

Martin 'Joey' Schulze [http://www.infodrom.org/~joey/log/?200811301247 reports] on the Debian Security meeting that took place 28.-30. November 2008 in Essen, Germany. Members of both the stable and the testing security teams attended as well as developers working on security updates for the backports archive.

The attendees discussed issues with regard to future security work in the Debian project and for the Debian distribution. Specific topics were the cooperation between the different teams both in terms of work as well as in terms of archive management, as well as long term support for Debian GNU/Linux installations that cannot support an upgrade every two years, such as large clusters of Debian GNU/Linux systems. Notes taken during the meeting will be sent to the debian-devel-announce mailing list.

New Stable SuiteTelecentro 2.0

Now [http://sourceforge.net/projects/suitetelecentro available for download] is the new stable version of ?SuiteTelecentro.

?SuiteTelecentro is a customisation of Debian and is built at the Free Software Laboratory of the IT Board of Banco do Brasil, the largest and oldest public bank in Brazil.

As [http://times.debian.net/?category=success-stories#1242 already covered] at Debian Times, ?SuiteTelecentro is a GNU/Linux solution which allows the use of low performance CPU and memory computers as affordable thin clients at telecentres. Over 4 million users now have affordable access to an Internet enabled computer thanks to this Free Software project.

?SuiteTelecentro is based on Debian GNU/Linux 4.0 Etch and LTSP 4.2. The new 2.0 version features easy installation, uses the Gnome graphical environment and includes: the OpenOffice suite, MySQL, PHP, Apache, MediaWiki and the Ocara telecentre management software.

Dependency based boot sequencing release goal completed

Petter Reinholdtsen [http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2008/11/msg00007.html announced] that the release goal of being able to support a dependency based boot sequence has been completed. This allows system services started in an order calculated based upon their dependencies on each other instead of hardcoded order.

He adds that 99.8% of all packages in unstable now have the dependency information with only 2 packages missing them and that more testers are needed to discover problems with currently untested combination of packages.

inter-distro collaboration for maintaining Games created

Initiated by members of the merged Debian and Ubuntu games teams and Hans de Goede from Fedora, a [http://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/games mailinglist] has been created to foster inter-distro/OS collaboration for [http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/games/2008-November/000006.html maintaining games]. The goal is to share and review patches that the upstream project is slow or unwilling to accept, or to take over as the new upstream for software where the original upstream is dead.

At this time, members of Arch, Debian, Fedora, Fink, FreeBSD, Gentoo, NetBSD, Opensolaris, PCBSD, Slackbuilds, SuSE and Yellowdog are on this list as well as Gnome and KDE.

Call for Talks for the Debian Developers' room at FOSDEM

Wouter Verhelst [http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2008/12/msg00000.html called for talks] for the Debian Developers' room at the upcoming Free and Open Source Developers European Meeting (FOSDEM) a yearly community meeting that takes place at the université libre de Bruxelles in Brussels, Belgium. Concentrating on bringing developers of Free Software together, Debian has again to chance for it's own one and a half day conference sub track.

Speakers interested in holding a Debian related talk should send Wouter their name the title of their talk, how long they would like the talk to take, a short bio and a short abstract.

When to do non maintainer uploads?

A recent non maintainer upload of the php5 package caused [http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2008/11/msg00643.html some discussion] how and when non maintainer uploads should be done. While fixing release critical bugs is indeed a very important topic (especially for long standing bugs without reactions from the maintainer), Release Wizard Steve Langasek [http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2008/11/msg00666.html reminded], that developers should still inform the maintainers about their plans to upload an NMU, while Thomas Viehmann [http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2008/12/msg00012.html reminded maintainers], that they should fix or at least comment on release critical bugs within two weeks.

Misc Developer News needed

Raphael Hertzog, the author of the Misc Developer News [http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2008/12/msg00014.html asks] developers to (regularly) [http://wiki.debian.org/DeveloperNews share] short news about their work and plans so they can be published in the Misc Developer News. Possible news are everything that is related to Debian development and not worth a dedicated mail to debian-devel-announce. The news are published whenever five news have come together. Raphael point out that the Misc Developer News can also be used to post calls for help.

Popular packages in Ubuntu that are not in Debian/main

Petter Reinholdtsen did a [http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2008/11/msg00659.html survey] on the question which popular Ubuntu packages are not included in Debian/main and why. In order to determine the packages' popularity Petter used their popcon ratings. Finally he ended up with a list of 152 popular Ubuntu packages that are currently not in Debian/main, a number he considered surprisingly low.

Many of these 152 packages are due to different package structure or other differences between Debian and Ubuntu, while others are already available in contrib or non-free. Of the remaining packages a lot are multimedia related. Petter thinks it would be very nice to have these packages available in Debian and wants to encourage their packaging.

In related news James Westby did a [http://jameswestby.net/weblog/ubuntu/04-revu.html survey] on the quality of the Ubuntu packages which are not included in Debian using their records in the Ubuntu bug tracking system.

New Developers

1 applicant has been [http://lists.debian.org/debian-project/2008/11/msg00071.html accepted] as Debian Maintainer since the prior issue of the Debian Project News. Please welcome Jörg Sommer in our project!

Other news

Adeodato Simó sent [http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2008/11/msg00006.html bits from buildd world]. Buildds are a part of Debians infrastructure organizing which automated build system (buid daemon) is building which package for which architecture. Beside some personal changes, he also explains the proper ways to contect them as well as where the source code of the buildd infrastructure is maintained.

Important Debian Security Advisories

Debian's Security Team recently released advisories for these packages (among others): [http://www.debian.org/security/2008/dsa-1667 python2.4], [http://www.debian.org/security/2008/dsa-1669 xulrunner], [http://www.debian.org/security/2008/dsa-1671 iceweasel], [http://www.debian.org/security/2008/dsa-1673 wireshark] and [http://www.debian.org/security/2008/dsa-1675 phpmyadmin]. 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 two weeks. If you need to be kept up to date about security advisories released by the Debian Security Team, please subscribe to the [http://lists.debian.org/debian-security-announce/ security mailing list] for announcements.

New and noteworthy packages

The following packages were added to the unstable Debian archive recently ([http://packages.debian.org/unstable/main/newpkg among others]):

Debian Package of the Day featured the package [http://debaday.debian.net/2008/11/30// apticron] (a cron-script to mail impending apt updates).

Work-needing packages

Currently 488 packages are orphaned and 117 packages are up for adoption. Please take a look at the [http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2008/11/msg00595.html recent] [http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2008/11/msg00455.html reports] to see if there are packages you are interested in or view the complete list of [http://www.debian.org/devel/wnpp/help_requested packages which need your help].

Want to continue reading DPN?

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 [http://wiki.debian.org/ProjectNews/HowToContribute contributing page] to find out how to help. We're looking forward to receiving your mail at debian-publicity@lists.debian.org.

[http://www.techforce.com.br Andre Felipe Machado], Jon Evans, ?RichardHartmann, Y and Z contributed to this issue of the Debian Project News.


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