Debian Project News - June 9th, 2014

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

DebConf15, which will be held in Heidelberg, Germany, ran a logo competition in May. After the votes were tallied, they are pleased to announce Valessio Brito as the winner with his submitted design. The winning design (with ongoing work on optimisation for print, web, etc.) can be found on the DebConf15 artwork page.

Mike Gabriel from the MATE package team announced that the MATE 1.8 desktop environment has fully arrived in Debian. MATE is a fork of what was previously the GNOME v2 desktop environment. It is available in unstable, testing, and wheezy-backports. Feel free to use and test via the meta-packages mate-desktop-environment and mate-desktop-environment-extras.

Antonio Terceiro wrote on his blog about how new versions of packages can potentially break some functionality in other packages, and what can be done about this. He detailed the Debian Continuous Integration project which checks inter-package dependencies across the entire Debian archive. The origins of the project go back to the introduction of the autopkgtest tool, which tests packages in their installed form, and was later adopted as the DEP-8 standard. The continuous integration tool, called debci, is run against the entire archive for packages that declare a test suite using the DEP-8 format. Debian CI runs at most four tests per day and publishes its results at ci.debian.net every hour along with a global status. With the introduction of Debian CI earlier this year there has been a rise in the number of packages with test suites. Maintainers are encouraged to use test suites in their packages and read the documentation about the system.

The 35th issue of the miscellaneous news for developers has been released and covers the following topics:

duck: checks URLs in debian/control and debian/upstream files

mentors.debian.net attracting more and more contributions

Debian Maintainer Dashboard: RSS feed available

how-can-i-help: monitor opportunities for contributions, and more!

Common mistakes with OpenPGP keys in Debian

DEP-12 supported by the PTS

In an update of the Release Team delegation, DPL Lucas Nussbaum announced that Emilio Pozuelo Monfort was joining the Release Team, and updated its delegation.

Bug #750000 has been opened on May 31 by Holger Levsen, reporting an upgrade issue discovered by piuparts.

Five applicants have been accepted as Debian Maintainers, and six people have started to maintain packages since the previous issue of the Debian Project News. Please welcome Harlan Lieberman-Berg, Graham Inggs, Gert Wollny, Leo Iannacone, Sebastien Badia, Lubomir Rintel, David King, Hugo Lefeuvre, Domenico Iezzi, Stefan Breunig, and Roland Fehrenbacher into our project!

Debian's Security Team recently released advisories for these packages (among others): mod-wsgi, chromium-browser, lxml, typo3-src, php5, gnutls26, chkrootkit, python-gnupg, libav, python-bottle, linux, openssl, and mupdf. Please read them carefully and take the proper measures.

The Debian team in charge of squeeze long term support released a security update announcement for these packages: gnutls26, chkrootkit, and openssl, 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, stable updates list, and long term support security updates) for announcements.

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

Currently 585 packages are orphaned and 139 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, Donald Norwood and Justin B Rye.