Debian Project News - January 27th, 2014

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

Lucas Nussbaum sent his monthly report of DPL activities for December 2013 and the first half of January 2014. Lucas started public discussions on several topics, such as evaluation criteria for trusted organisations and Debian services and Debian infrastructure .

Sylvestre Ledru reported on his blog that Debian France has opened an online shop with plenty of Debian goodies: some are already familiar as they were sold during FOSDEM or various DebConfs (like the Swiss army knives or the classic polo shirts), but there are also brand-new Wheezy-themed t-shirts. The website is only in French, although an English version might exist in the future.

Neil McGovern announced that Valve wish to express their thanks to the Debian community for the operating system on which they based Steam OS, a distribution for gamers. They are offering to all Debian Members and Debian Maintainers a free subscription which provides access to all past and future Valve produced games. If your cryptographic key is in the Debian keyring and you are interested in this offer, send a GPG-signed email to Jo Shields.

Daniel Pocock announced the availability of a SIP service for Debian Members. This service, launched during the mini-DebConf in Paris, offers real-time audio and video conversation through the browser (with WebRTC) or a diverse range of traditional softphones, including Empathy, Jitsi, Lumicall, Linphone, and CSIPSimple. A phonebooth is available for people wanting to reach Debian Members through this service. For more information on how to use this service, please consult the dedicated wiki page. This service has been made possible by a significant effort by the DSA team over the last few weeks. The Debian project is encouraging other free software projects, including Debian derivatives, to emulate what Debian has done so that we can all call each other.

The 34th issue of the miscellaneous news for developers has been released and covers the following topics:

email notifications for git commits on git.debian.org

alioth.debian.org now exports project meta-data as RDF (using DOAP/ADMS.SW)

animate the Debian microblogging accounts!

cryptographic verification of upstream packages

state of the debian-keyring

ci.debian.net

Lucas Nussbaum mentioned on his blog that thanks to Christophe Siraut, the Debian Maintainer Dashboard (a service based on the Ultimate Debian Database) now provides RSS feeds for recently added tasks.

Adam D. Barratt announced that Wheezy 7.4 is to be published on February 8, and Squeeze 6.0.9 on February 15. The NEW queue for these distributions will be frozen one week before the actual release date.

Clint Adams posted some statistics about the Debian keyrings, breaking down the keys used in Debian by their types, lengths, and hash algorithms.

There are several upcoming Debian-related events:

February 1-2, Brussels, Belgium — Debian booth at FOSDEM

February 14-16, Minsk, Belarus — LVEE conference, Winter Edition

You can find more information about Debian-related events and talks on the events section of the Debian wiki, or subscribe to one of our events mailing lists for different regions: Europe, Netherlands, Hispanic America, North America.

Do you want to organise a Debian booth or a Debian install party? Are you aware of other upcoming Debian-related events? Have you delivered a Debian talk that you want to link on our talks page? Send an email to the Debian Events Team.

Two applicants have been accepted as Debian Developers, nine applicants have been accepted as Debian Maintainer, and eleven people have started to maintain packages since the previous issue of the Debian Project News. Please welcome Apollon Oikonomopoulos, Vincent Cheng Diane Trout, Héctor Romojaro Gómez, Ximin Luo, Reuben Thomas, Sergiusz Pawłowicz, Timo Weingärtner, Christos Trochalakis, Dmitry Shachnev, Chris Boot, Marco Bardelli, Tianon Gravi, Ivan Mincik, Jose Luis Rivero, Richard Stephen Uhler, Rupert Swarbrick, Jorge Soares, Sylvain Pineau, Mark Buda, Jyrki Pulliainen, and Maykel Moya into our project!

Debian's Security Team recently released advisories for these packages (among others): asterisk, devscripts, openssl, libxfont, spice, srtp, movabletype-opensource, libspring-java, graphviz, djvulibre, mysql-5.1, libvirt, drupal7, and mysql-5.5. 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) for announcements.

369 packages were added to the unstable Debian archive recently. Among many others are:

Currently 520 packages are orphaned and 155 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.

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Back issues of this newsletter are available.

This issue of Debian Project News was edited by Carl J Mannino, Cédric Boutillier and Justin B Rye.