What's up, Debian?

Bits from the cabals

Overview

• Disclaimer
• Activities 2007
• User-relevant changes
• Outlook 2008
• Recent development news
• Trends in development

Activities 2007

• Debian MiniConf6 at LCA 2007 in Sydney
• FOSDEM 2007 in Brussels
• Sam Hocevar voted DPL
• Debian 4.0 "etch" released
• Debconf7 in Edinburgh, Scotland
• Google Summer of Code participation
• Skolelinux 3.0 "terra" is released
• FrOSCon 2007
• FOSS.in
• Extremadura QA in December
• Bug Squashing Parties

Overview

• Disclaimer
• Activities 2007

• User-relevant changes

• Outlook 2008
• Recent development news
• Trends in development

Security support

• The testing-security team is further closing the gap between testing and production use
• 3 new members have joined the security team, one assistant was promoted to full staff member.
• Better cooperation between the two teams, shift in split anticipated (stable vs. testing becomes embargoed vs. non-embargoed)
• Lenny will incorporate most of Security-Hardening: compiler/linker extensions and settings to guard again the most common run-time problems

Improved and translatable package descriptions

• The Smith review project has made good progress: 150/101/32/18 reviewing and improving package descriptions
• Package descriptions are now translateable
• Debian (debconf + d-i) now supports 58 languages, 19 are in progress, "lenny" will likely support 77.

Retired and new ports

• The sparc32 port has been retired
• Lenny will officially support GNU/kFreeBSD
• http://debian-ports.org replaces gnuab.org to host unofficial architectures, currently armel, hurd-i386, kfreebsd-i386, and kfreebsd-amd64

Package searching

• Integration of debtags into the main index files
• apt-xapian-index, a system-wide index of packages, allowing for fast queries over descriptions, tags, and other metadata
• Other packages can install plugins to add extra information to the index
• An apt-xapian-index tutorial is available on Enrico's website

Miscellanous

• The debian-med project is nearing a 1.0 release, making Debian an even more attractive choice for medical staff and biological scientists
• Our mirror network grows: 100 new mirrors and 6 new primary servers
• We are now almost entirely UTF-8-based
• dselect is almost retired
• The number of games is rocketing upwards
• Etch-and-a-half upcoming, kernel 2.6.24 to be added to stable

Overview

• Disclaimer
• Activities 2007
• User-relevant changes

• Outlook 2008

• Recent development news
• Trends in development

Outlook 2008

• Debian MiniConf7 at LCA 2008 in Melbourne, now
• FOSDEM 2008 in Brussels, 24–25 February
• Debian Med 1.0 release
• Etch-and-a-half
• DebConf8 in Mar del Plata, Argentina, 2–17 August
• FrOSCon 2008, end of August
• Planned release of Debian 4.1, "lenny" towards the end of 2008

When will Lenny be released?

When will Lenny be released?

(by Neil McGovern)

Overview

• Disclaimer
• Activities 2007
• User-relevant changes

• Recent development news

• Trends in development

Debian Maintainers

• New developer status in the project
• Debian maintainers can upload new versions of packages they maintain without the need for sponsors
• No voting rights, not debian-private access, no access to Debian infrastructure (yet; except alioth)

Debian-women

• Project sort of stalled
• Activity of #debian-women channel still high
• We now count ~12 active female contributors
• IME: females increasingly more present throughout the project
• The Debian cowboy days have definitely gone, I feel

Other recent changes

• Package tracking system was remade, now sports RSS feeds and more information: Homepage and Vcs-* fields, LowThresholdNMU, Debian Maintainers
• Debian source packages can now be compressed with bzip2
• shlibs now work with symbols: on-demand versioned dependencies
• Peter Palfrader joins the Debian System Administrators

Overview

• Disclaimer
• Activities 2007
• User-relevant changes
• Outlook 2008
• Recent development news

• Trends in development

Better collaboration

• Strong trend towards team maintenance, especially large teams like pkg-python-modules, pkg-games and pkg-perl taking on more and more packages
• VCS are finding their way into Debian: Vcs-* headers and debcheckout

Improved tools and processes

• Infrequently, hackish packaging tools are causing more and more headaches (see this thread
• (D)VCS are being used more and more for packaging
• Experiments replacing source package format with (D)VCS-based formats are in progress

Shameless plug

See you today at 11:30 when I talk about "vcs-pkg", (Debian) packaging with version control systems!

Discussion

How could we improve Debian further?

Thank you

Thank you for your attention!

And thanks to the people who helped me prepare this: Andreas Tille, Michael Banck, Kevin Mark, Josip Rodin, MJ Ray, Cyril Brulebois, Stefano Zacchiroli, Frans Pop, Moritz Mühlenhoff, Russ Allbery, Steve Langasek, Luk Class, Andreas Schuldei, Christian Perrier, and those I forgot to list.

Licence

These slides, their design, and the content are © Martin F. Krafft and released under the terms of the CC by-nc-sa 2.5 licence.

reStructuredText sources: slides.rst and ui/debian/*.

Slides based on the S5 presentation system.