Debian Project News - December 0th, 2014

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

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DebConf14: Talks, thoughts, comments and progress

The annual Debian developer meeting was held this year in Portland, Oregon, August 23 – 31, 2014. DebConf14 attendees participated in talks, discussions, workshops and programming sessions. Video teams captured a lot of the main talks and discussions for streaming for interactive attendees and for the Debian video archive. Between the video, presentations, and handouts the coverage came from the attendees in blogs, posts, and project updates of which we've gathered a few for your reading. Hope to see you next year at DebConf15!

Gregor Herrmann and a few members of the Debian Perl group had an informal unofficial pkg-perl micro-sprint and were very productive.

Vincent Sanders shared an inspired gift in the form of a plaque given to Russ Allbery in thanks for his tireless work of keeping sanity in the Debian mailing lists. Pictures of the plaque and design scheme are linked in the post. Vincent also shared his experiences of the conference and hopes the organisers have recovered.

Noah Meyerhans' adventuring to Debian by train, (Inter)netted some interesting IPv6 data for future road and railwarriors.

Hideki Yamane sent a gentle reminder for English speakers to speak more slowly.

Daniel Pocock posted of GSoC talks at DebConf14, highlights include the Java Project Dependency Builder and the WebRTC JSCommunicator.

Thomas Goirand gives us some insight into a working task list of accomplishments and projects he was able to complete at DebConf14, from the OpenStack discussion to tasksel talks, and completion of some things started last year at DebConf13.

Antonio Terceiro blogged about debci and the Debian Continuous Integration project, Ruby, Redmine, and Noosfero. His post also shares the atmosphere of being able to interact directly with peers once a year.

Stefano Zacchiroli blogged about a talk he did on debsources which now has its own HACKING file.

Juliana Louback penned: DebConf 2014 and How I Became a Debian Contributor.

Elizabeth Krumbach Joseph's in-depth summary of DebConf14 is a great read. She discussed Debian Validation & CI, debci and the Continuous Integration project, Automated Validation in Debian using LAVA, and Outsourcing webapp maintenance.

Lucas Nussbaum by way of a blog post releases the very first version of Debian Trivia modelled after the TCP/IP Drinking Game.

François Marier's shares additional information and further discussion on Outsourcing your webapp maintenance to Debian.

Joachim Breitner gave a talk on Haskell and Debian, created a new tool for binNMUs for Haskell packages which runs via cron job. The output is available for Haskell and for OCaml, and he still had a small amount of time to go dancing.

Jaldhar Harshad Vyas was not able to attend DebConf this year, but he did tune in to the videos made available by the video team and gives an insightful viewpoint to what was being seen.

Jérémy Bobbio posted about Reproducible builds in Debian in his recap of DebConf14. One of the topics at hand involved defining a canonical path where packages must be built and a BOF discussion on reproducible builds from where the conversation moved to discussions in both Octave and Groff. New helpers dh_fixmtimes and dh_genbuildinfo were added to BTS. The .buildinfo format has been specified on the wiki and reviewed. Lots of work is being done in the project, interested parties can help with the TODO list or join the new IRC channel #debian-reproducible on irc.debian.org.

Steve McIntyre posted a Summary from the d-i / debian-cd BoF at DC14, with some of the session video available online. Current jessie D-I needs some help with the testing on less common architectures and languages, and release scheduling could be improved. Future plans: Switching to a GUI by default for jessie, a default desktop and desktop choice, artwork, bug fixes and new architecture support. debian-cd: Things are working well. Improvement discussions are on selecting which images to make I.E. netinst, DVD, et al., debian-cd in progress with http download support, Regular live test builds, Other discussions and questions revolve around which ARM platforms to support, specially-designed images, multi-arch CDs, and cloud-init based images. There is also a call for help as the team needs help with testing, bug-handling, and translations.

Holger Levsen reports on feedback about the feedback from his LTS talk at DebConf14. LTS has been perceived well, fits a demand, and people are expecting it to continue; however, this is not without a few issues as Holger explains in greater detail the lacking gatekeeper mechanisms, and how contributions are needed from finance to uploads. In other news the security-tracker is now fixed to know about old stable. Time is short for that fix as once jessie is released the tracker will need to support stable, oldstable which will be wheezy, and oldoldstable.

Jonathan McDowell's summary of DebConf14 includes a fair perspective of the host city and the benefits of planning of a good DebConf14 location. He also talks about the need for facetime in the Debian project as it correlates with and improves everyone's ability to work together. DebConf14 also provided the chance to set up a hard time frame for removing older 1024 bit keys from Debian keyrings.

Steve McIntyre posted a Summary from the "State of the ARM" BoF at DebConf14 with updates on the 3 current ports armel, armhf and arm64. armel which targets the ARM EABI soft-float ARMv4t processor may eventually be going away, while armhf which targets the ARM EABI hard-float ARMv7 is doing well as the cross-distro standard. Debian is has moved to a single armmp kernel flavour using Device Tree Blobs and should be able to run on a large range of ARMv7 hardware. The arm64 port recently entered the main archive and it is hoped to release with jessie with 2 official builds hosted at ARM. There is talk of laptop development with an arm64 CPU. Buildds and hardware are mentioned with acknowledgements for donated new machines, Banana Pi boards, and software by way of ARM's DS-5 Development Studio - free for all Debian Developers. Help is needed! Join #debian-arm on irc.debian.org and/or the debian-arm mailing list. There is an upcoming Mini-DebConf in November 2014 hosted by ARM in Cambridge, UK.

Tianon Gravi posted about the atmosphere and contrast between an average conference and a DebConf.

Joseph Bisch posted about meeting his GSOC mentors, attending and contributing to a keysigning event and did some work on debmetrics which is powering metrics.debian.net. Debmetrics provides a uniform interface for adding, updating, and viewing various metrics concerning Debian.

Harlan Lieberman-Berg's DebConf Retrospective shared the feel of DebConf, and detailed some of the work on debugging a build failure, work with the pkg-perl team on a few uploads, and work on a javascript slowdown issue on codeeditor.

Ana Guerrero López reflected on Ten years contributing to Debian.

Long Term Support (LTS) Reports

Freexian's offer to bring together funding from multiple companies in order to sponsor the work of multiple developers on Debian LTS also required paid contributors to provide a public monthly report of their paid work. Freexian sponsored Thorsten Alteholz and Holger Levsen in July and August of this year who have both reported on their progress: Thorsten - July and Holger - July. While Freexian has not reached its minimal goal of funding the equivalent of a half-time position which is reflected in the results, the program has learned a few things such as: Paid contributors handle almost 70% of the updates and counting only on volunteers would not have worked. It is also worthy of note that quite a few companies that promised help have not delivered on the promised help yet, though that should not distract from the fact that this project wouldn’t exist without the support of multiple companies and organizations who did step up.

Raphael Hertzog posted an August update on his Free Software Activities. Distro Tracker has Python 3 compatibility with the full test suite passing Python 3.4 and Djando 1.6. Help is still needed. Django 1.7 had patches applied for horizon, django-restricted-resource and django-testscenarios. Raphael was also able to contribute towards the French translation for Dpkg.

Thorsten Alteholz posted an August update on his current works with FTP and accepting over 237 packages, and some work on Squeeze LTS with new versions of nspr security update, libapache-mod-security, polarssl security, and krb5 security.

Cinnamon environment now available in testing

Margarita Manterola announces that the Cinnamon environment now available in testing. She gives instructions for installing the packages and notes that there still are bugs that they haven't found yet, so bug reports are welcomed. Contributions via the pkg-cinnamon project in alioth are also encouraged.

Debian turns 21, and celebrates!

On Saturday, August 16th, Celebrations were held around the world as our beloved Operation System turned 21 years old! The annual Debian Day gatherings hosted LAN parties, bug squashing, and of course cake!

Google Summer of Code

Juliana Louback, via blog post, updated the status of JSCommunicator which was part of Google's Summer of Code 2014. JSCommunicator is a SIP communication tool developed in HTML and JavaScript. The code was designed to make integration with a website or web app as simple as possible. Users may check out the live demo here.

Matthias Klumpp shared via blog post an update to the Debian implementation of AppStream, DEP-11, and the work of his GSOC intern Abhishek Bhattacharjee's DEP-11 generator which pulls metadata from multiple sources and converts them to YAML towards the larger possibility of a “software center”. The generator will be a part of the Debian Archive Kit used to manage Debian archives on the ftp servers.

jessie; Upcoming freeze reminder

We would like to remind everyone that jessie is due to be frozen soon, at 23:59 UTC on the 5th of November 2014, specifically. Lucas Nussbaum asks, "Will the packages you rely on be part of Debian jessie?", with a helpful series of steps you can use to be prepared. Please also read the Freeze Policy for jessie to ensure you are in fact ready, prepared, and are aware of the procedures taking place.

Rebuild of Debian using Clang

Sylvestre Ledru updates a Rebuild of Debian using Clang. Clang 3.5.0 has been released. The new version has seen a marked decrease in build failures from 2,040 packages at 9.5% to 1,261 packages at 5.7%. Upstream fixes started with bugs such as Conflicting types and Changes of the default constructor, then moved to a different parallel approach of focusing on improving gcc compatibility with a warning category instead of errors.

Reports

Laura Arjona posted about Software Freedom Day with information on Debian Derivatives, F-Droid, Jabber/XMPP, and the upcoming DebConf15.

Interviews

Stefano Zacchiroli has shared a recent interview by Steven Ovadia of My Linux Rig. In the interview, he talks about his use of GNOME 3 and GNOME shell on his Thinkpad, a list of software he depends upon on a day to day basis and shares a screenshot of his desktop.

New Debian Contributors

6 applicants have been accepted as Debian Developers, 6 applicants have been accepted as Debian Maintainer, and 28 people have started to maintain packages since the previous issue of the Debian Project News. Please welcome Ian James Campbell, Dmitry Shachnev, Alexander Chernyakhovsky, Ondrej Certik, Emmanuel Bourg, Ole Streicher, Andrew Page, Anders Kaseorg, Josue Ortega, Kouhei Maeda, Stefan Völkel, Yauheni Kaliuta, Blair Hester, Friedrich Beckmann, Tong Sun, Elena Grandi, Rémi Verchère, Anthony Wong, Michele Orru, Francesca Ciceri, Jordan Justen, Tamás Nepusz, Riley Baird, Felix Lechner, Greg Horn, Joseph Bisch, Shell Xu, Christoph Junghans, Victor Seva, Tim Rühsen, Raphaël Halimi, Grégoire Passault, Jose M Calhariz, Elmar Pruesse, Benedikt Wildenhain, Ruben Undheim, Andreas Cadhalpun, Adnan Hodzic, Peter Blackman, and Carl Suster into our project!

Release-Critical bugs statistics for the upcoming release

According to the Bugs Search interface of the Ultimate Debian Database, the upcoming release, Debian jessie, is currently affected by 410 Release-Critical bugs. Ignoring bugs which are easily solved or on the way to being solved, roughly speaking, about 355 Release-Critical bugs remain to be solved for the release to happen.

There are also more detailed statistics as well as some hints on how to interpret these numbers.

Important Debian Security Advisories

Debian's Security Team recently released advisories for these packages (among others): gpgme1.0, xen, cacti, php5, python-imaging, python-django, mediawiki, eglibc, s3ql, squid3, lua5.1, lua5.2, php-cas, iceweasel, procmail, acpi-support, file, curl, bind9, gnupg, apt, dbus, libav, and icedove. 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: puppet, augeas, python2.6, acpi-support, munin, reportbug, nspr, openssl, libapache-mod-security, lzo2, polarssl, krb5, gpgme1.0, cacti, python-imaging, live-config, eglibc, libwpd, squid3, procmail, lua5.1, bind9, file, gnupg2, ia32-libs, gnupg, apt, nginx, acpi-support, wordpress, and libstruts1.2-java.

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 list) for announcements.

New and noteworthy packages

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

Work-needing packages

Currently 593 packages are orphaned and 139 packages are up for adoption: please visit the complete list of packages which need your help.

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This issue of Debian Project News was edited by XXX, Cédric Boutillier, Victor Nițu and Justin B Rye.