Debian Project News - March 3rd, 2014

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

Don Armstrong announced that the Technical Committee, which was asked in bug #727708 to decide which init system would be the default init system for Debian, had reached the decision that for Linux architectures the default in Jessie should be systemd. Additional discussions regarding the technical policy necessary for implementing this decision are still ongoing and can be followed on the debian-ctte mailing list.

Debian has been selected as a mentoring organisation for the Google Summer of Code (GSoC) 2014, a program that allows post-secondary students aged 18 and older to earn a stipend writing code for free and open source software projects during the summer. Nicolas Dandrimont sent a call for mentors and students to participate in this year's Summer of Code. Mentors for prospective projects can submit proposals on the project ideas list. Eligible students can take a look at the list of projects, engage in discussions with mentors and prepare their applications. People interested in this program are encouraged to come and chat with the Debian GSoC team on the #debian-soc IRC channel on irc.oftc.net, or to send an email to the SoC coordination mailing list.

The DebConf team is well into the planning for DebConf14 which will take place in Portland, Oregon, USA during 23–31 August 2014. They are now contacting potential sponsors from all around the globe. If you can think of interested organisations, please feel free to reach out to them, and ask, or if you are not comfortable asking directly, to contact the sponsors-team with any leads.

Mònica Ramírez Arceda sent a public invitation for the mini-DebConf in Barcelona on 15–16 March organised by Debian Women. The schedule of talks is already available. Registration of participants is recommended. The organisers are still raising funds to cover the costs of running the conference and to offer travel sponsorship to people who can't pay for it. Please consider donating any amount you can to our crowd-funding campaign, or contact them if you would like to become a sponsor. For more information, visit the website of the event.

Debian France is organising a small GSoC-like operation to recruit new Debian contributors. It will be mainly of interest for French-speaking candidates since the reward is a paperback copy of the French translation of the Debian Administrator's Handbook. Debian France is now actively looking for potential mentors to propose projects. The scope of the projects is much smaller than a Google Summer of Code (from about 16 to 32 hours of work). If you want to mentor such a project, submit your ideas on the dedicated wiki page.

The ninth update of the oldstable distribution of Debian (codename Squeeze ) was released on February 15.

Christian Perrier indicated on his blog that bug #740000 was reported on February 24 by Miguel Landaeta, 3 months and 4 days after bug #730000. Only time will tell who will win the contest to guess when bugs #800000 and #1000000 will be reported.

Christian Svensson announced that he managed to install Debian on the OpenRISC open-source processor.

Martin Zobel-Helas and Enrico Zini started a census in order to gather information about software services for the Debian community. The list of known services so far is available on the wiki. If you maintain or simply know a service that is not yet on the list, please edit the wiki page to add relevant information.

Stefano Zacchiroli blogged about recent improvements of sources.debian.net, a service allowing anyone to search easily through the source code present in Debian's archive.

Martin Pitt sent some bits from the autopkgtest team. The project has been evolving a lot recently, and now has new documentation, new virtualisation servers and new test declarations. To round it off he announced ci.debian.net, a new service that continuously runs package tests declared in the DEP-8 format, using autopkgtest.

Bernd Zeimetz announced that a Debian Bug Squashing Party is being organised for 25–27 April in the offices of conova communications GmbH in Salzburg, Austria. Information and a registration form are available on the wiki.

There are several upcoming Debian-related events:

15–16 March, Barcelona, Spain — Debian Women Mini-DebConf

15–16 March, Chemnitz, Germany — Debian booth at the Chemnitz Linux Days

You can find more information about Debian-related events and talks on the events section of the Debian web site, 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.

15 people have started to maintain packages since the previous issue of the Debian Project News. Please welcome Jerome Charaoui, Arturo Borrero Gonzalez, Antonio Ospite, Facundo Guerrero, Micheal Waltz, Ian Haywood, François-Régis Vuillemin, Jesse Rhodes, Andrew Kelley, Michael Hall, Andriy Grytsenko, Leo Singer, Scott Talbert, Matus Valo, and Tomasz Nitecki into our project!

Debian's Security Team recently released advisories for these packages (among others): libcommons-fileupload-java, libspring-java, iceweasel, pidgin, parcimonie, file, chromium-browser, libtar, postgresql-8.4, postgresql-9.1, gnutls26, and otrs2. Please read them carefully and take the proper measures.

Debian's Backports Team released advisories for these packages: nss, and pidgin, Please read them carefully and take the proper measures.

Debian's Stable Release Team released an update announcement for the package: certificatepatrol. Please read it 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.

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

Currently 559 packages are orphaned and 140 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 Cédric Boutillier and Justin B Rye.