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= Personnel changes in Debians Technical Committee =

After being member of Debians Technical Committee for three years, Anthony Towns
= Personnel changes in Debian's Technical Committee =

After being member of Debian's Technical Committee for three years, Anthony Towns
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the sessions of the sessions to be held in Debians Developer Room at the upcoming Free and Open Source the sessions of the sessions to be held in Debian's Developer Room at the upcoming Free and Open Source

[:DebianWiki/EditorGuide#translation:Translation(s)]: none

(!) ["/Discussion"]



Dedicated to [http://www.debian.org/News/2008/20081229 Thiemo Seufer].

Welcome to this year's 1st issue of DPN, the newsletter for the Debian community. Topics covered in this issue include:

  • Bits from the Debian CD team
  • Bits from the Debian Installer team
  • Results from the "Lenny release GR"
  • ... and much more.

Bits from the Debian CD team

Frans Pop send [http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2009/01/msg00002.html Bits from the Debian CD team], summarising various changes effecting the installation medias for the upcoming release of Debian GNU/Linux 5.0 "Lenny".

Most notable change is the replacement of the XFCE installation disc with a "light desktop" installation disc of installing Xfce or LXDE. Furthermore are all four major desktop environments (GNOME, KDE, Xfce and LXDE) directly installable from the first DVD image; the desktop environment to be installable can now be chosen via the boot menu.

The Debian CD team still plans to create the following images: Architecture-specific images:

  • businesscard CD
  • network install (netinst) CD
  • full CD (650MB) images, users can now choose between:
    • standard CD set, which will by default install GNOME
    • special KDE CD
    • special light desktop environments CD (LXDE + Xfce)
  • DVD set
  • Blu-ray image (only as jigdo files for i386, amd64 and source)

Multi-architecture images:

  • alpha/hppa/ia64 network install CD
  • i386/amd64/powerpc network install CD
  • i386/amd64 DVD; also includes source packages

Bits from the Debian Installer team

Christian Perrier [http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2008/12/msg00013.html send] bits from the Debian Installer team. With the upcoming release of Debian GNU/Linux 5.0 "Lenny" in mind, he summarized the improvements made during this release cycle, including (but not limited to) support for loading firmware during installation, SATA RAID support, early upgrade of packages wrt security fixes, support for "volatile", new boot menu for i386/amd64 and support for installation from Windows through win32-loader.

He also mentions, that the next release candidate version is aimed to be the version used in the Lenny official release. This version will fix a few bugs discovered in Release Candidate 1 (RC1) and a few more which were listed in RC1 errata. It will also be based on the 2.6.26-12 kernel packages. They intend to begin the final release process of Debian Installer RC2 in the very early days of January 2009.

He also stresses the need for new blood to join the debian installer team after Lenny has been released, since from the 180 people having commit access only three have been active in the coordination list and irc channel during the last three month.

Results from the "Lenny release GR"

Bdeale Garbee [http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2009/01/msg00000.html posted] the results of the so called [http://www.debian.org/vote/2008/vote_003 "Lenny release GR"], a general resolution about the handling firmware issues and similar release critical bugs affecting Debian GNU/Linux 5.0 "Lenny".

From all the proposed options, the one with the headline "Assume blobs comply with GPL unless proven otherwise" one. With this option passed, the Debian project now assumes, that "source less" firmware (rather small, programs that internally control various electronic devices see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firmware) has been created the way it is (without a "real source" in a higher level programming language) and therefore full files the requirements of the GNU General Public License.

New maintainer for search.debian.org needed

[mailto:tv@beamnet.de Thomas Viehmann] is [http://lists.debian.org/debian-project/2009/01/msg00024.html urgently seeking] a new maintainer for [http://search.debian.org search.debian.org]. The search engine is a slightly patched xapian-omega instance. You should be a Developer (or a team) for access to the installation. Some more improvements to the language support are desirable, that involves some C++, but Thomas would try to help out there, too.

Security support for next testing (squeeze)

The Testing Security Team [http://lists.debian.org/debian-testing-security-announce/2008/12/msg00019.html announced] that security support for the next Debian testing (codename squeeze) will not begin immediately after the release of lenny as stable. Users of Debian testing who need security support should stay with lenny until the begin of security support for squeeze is announced.

Internationalisation support for planet.debian.org

Jörg Jasper [http://blog.ganneff.de/blog/2008/12/21/planet-i18n.html announced] that [http://planet.debian.org planet.debian.org], a service collecting the personal blogs of different Debian Developers, Maintainers and other Debian associated people, is now capable of hosting Web-Pages, RSS- and Atom-Feeds in different languages as can be seen by the [http://planet.debian.org/es/ Spanish Planet Debian].

Adding a new language is quite simple but requires at least 10 feeds to be added to the newly created language.

Personnel change of the Debian Secretary

Due to the criticism while conducting the recent vote "Lenny release GR", Manoj Srivastava, long term secretary of the Debian Project decided to [http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2008/12/msg00765.html resign] from this position. Following his resignation many developers have thanked him for his work.

Debian Project Leader Steve ?McIntyre is now [http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2008/12/msg00011.html searching] for volunteers for this position, while Bdale Garbee current Chairman of the Technical Committee is now [http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2008/12/msg00801.html serving as Acting Secretary].

Personnel changes in Debian's Technical Committee

After being member of Debian's Technical Committee for three years, Anthony Towns [http://lists.debian.org/debian-ctte/2009/01/msg00006.html resigned] from that position to get fresh blod into the committee. We would like to thanks Anthony for the work he did in the past years!

Bdale Garbee, current chair of the Technical Committee [http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2009/01/msg00003.html announced], that Russ Allbery and Don Armstrong have been added to the technical committee. Please join us in congratulating them on achieving this level of recognition and trust within our community!

Personnel changes in the New Maintainer Frontdesk

Christoph Berg [http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2008/12/msg00010.html announced] some personnel changes in the New Maintainer Frontdesk, handling applications of people interested in becoming Debian Developers. Marc Brockschmidt, who has been a member since 2005, has resigned from this position, while Bernd Zeimetz has joined the team.

We would like to thank Marc for his long term dedication!

Other news

The 12th issue of the [http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2008/12/msg00009.html miscellaneous news for developers] has been released and covers the following topics:

  • Bdale Garbee as Acting Secretary
  • New proposal to track maintenance status of all packages
  • Packages-arch-specific maintenance changes
  • Githubredir available
  • Babelbox updated for Lenny

Holger Levsen [http://lists.debian.org/debian-events-eu/2009/01/msg00002.html called] for help to record the sessions of the sessions to be held in Debian's Developer Room at the upcoming Free and Open Source Developer Europe Meeting (FOSDEM).

Simon ?McVittie wrote a small [http://smcv.pseudorandom.co.uk/2009/01/08_debian_bzr_to_git/ HOWTO] about "converting Debian packaging from bzr to git".

[http://gnowgi.org/2008/12/16/debian-dependency-map/ Nagarjuna G.] started a [http://www.gnowledge.org/search_debmap?val=1 service], drawing graphs representing dependency information of Debian packages, for example for [http://www.gnowledge.org/debmap_view?objid=python python] or [http://www.gnowledge.org/debmap_view?objid=emacs21 emacs21].

Ana Beatriz Guerrero Lopez [http://ekaia.org/blog/2009/01/01/new-years-proposal-look-at-your-reported-bugs/ proposed] to look at bug reports you reported and update their status as new years resolution and gave a brief explanation on how to do so. She also proposed to help the maintainers of you favourite package with their bugs.

Luk Claes and Ralf Treinen from the [http://nm.debian.org/gpg.php GPG Key Signing Coordination page] primarily aimed at prospective contributors to find existing Debian developers who can sign their key for the ID part of the NM maintainer process, are looking for some help with this service. It's not much work; a description of the tasks can be found [http://svn.debian.org/wsvn/nm/trunk/doc/gpg-coord/README?op=file&rev=0&sc=0 in their subversion repository].

Daniel Burrows [http://algebraicthunk.net/~dburrows/blog/entry/apt-system-diagram/ created] some diagrams about the apt-system and applications using it.

New Developers and Maintainer

Three applicants have been [http://lists.debian.org/debian-newmaint/2009/01/msg00009.html accepted] as Debian Developers and one applicant has been [http://lists.debian.org/debian-project/2008/12/msg00086.html accepted] as Debian Maintainer since the prior issue of the Debian Project News. Please welcome Michael Casadevall, Arthur Loiret, Jelmer Vernooij and Tiago Bortoletto Vaz into our project!

Release-critical bugs statistics for the upcoming release

According to the [http://bts.turmzimmer.net/details.php unofficial RC-bugs count], the upcoming release Debian GNU/Linux 5.0 "Lenny" is currently affected by 117 release critical bugs. 40 of them have already been fixed in Debian's "unstable" branch. Of the remaining 77 release critical bugs, 19 already have a patch (which might need testing) and 11 are marked as pending.

Ignoring these bugs as well as release critical bugs for packages in contrib or non-free, 45 release critical bugs remain to be solved for the release to happen.

Important Debian Security Advisories

Debian's Security Team recently released advisories for these packages (among others): [http://www.debian.org/security/2008/dsa-1688 courier-authlib], [http://www.debian.org/security/2008/dsa-1689 proftpd-dfsg], [http://www.debian.org/security/2008/dsa-1690 avahi], [http://www.debian.org/security/2008/dsa-1691 moodle], [http://www.debian.org/security/2008/dsa-1693 phppgadmin], [http://www.debian.org/security/2009/dsa-1694 xterm], [http://www.debian.org/security/2009/1695 ruby1.8 and ruby1.9], [http://www.debian.org/security/2009/1696 icedove], [http://www.debian.org/security/2009/1697 iceape] and [http://www.debian.org/security/2009/1698 gforge]. 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 packages [http://debaday.debian.net/2008/12/21/watch-from-procps-execute-a-program-at-regular-intervals-and-show-the-output/ procps] (watch: Execute a program at regular intervals and show the output), [http://debaday.debian.net/2008/12/28/atool-handling-archives-without-headaches/ atool] (handling archives without headaches) and [http://debaday.debian.net/2009/01/04/tellico-collection-manager-for-books-videos-music-and-a-whole-lot-more/ tellico] (a collection manager for books, videos, music and a whole lot more).

Work-needing packages

Currently 482 packages are orphaned and 107 packages are up for adoption. Please take a look at [http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2008/12/msg01039.html the] [http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2009/01/msg00016.html recent] [http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2009/01/msg00171.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.

Thomas Viehmann, Paul Wise, Y and Z contributed to this issue of the Debian Project News.


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