Debian Project News - June 7th, 2018

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

Welcome to the Debian Project News!

We hope that you are enjoying this edition of DPN.

For other news, please read the official Debian blog Bits from Debian, and follow https://micronews.debian.org which feeds (via-RSS) the @debian profile on several social networks.

Debian's Security Team releases current advisories on a daily basis (Security Advisories 2018). Please read them carefully and subscribe to the security mailing list.

At the end of this Project News we've added a Quick Links section which links to a selection of the posts made through our other media streams.

Internal News/Happenings

Updated Debian 9: 9.4 released

The Debian project announced the fourth update of its stable distribution Debian 9 (codename Stretch) on 10 March 2018 to point release 9.4.

This point release added corrections for security issues along with a few adjustments for serious problems. Security advisories have were published separately and are referenced where available. Upgrading an existing installation to this revision can be achieved by pointing the package management system at one of Debian's many HTTP mirrors. A comprehensive list of mirrors is available at: https://www.debian.org/mirror/list

Notification for upcoming end-of-life for Debian 8

Be advised, DSA has given advance notice that regular security support for Debian GNU/Linux 8 (code name Jessie) will be terminated on 17 June 2018.

Debian Policy 4.1.4.0 released

The Debian Policy Manual has had a new version released. The Debian Policy Manual deals with the structure and contents of the Debian archive, technical requirements each package must satisfy to be included in the archive, and the package management system developers have to be conversant with.

Upcoming shift to Ayatana (App)Indicator(s)

Mike Gabriel reports on the upcoming shift to Ayatana Application Indicators in Debian and work on generalizing the functionality of indicator icon applications to make them more independent of the desktop environment used. The status of the work may be viewed on the Ayatana Transition page with additional background from Mike's DebConf17 talk, blog posts, and the Ayatana Packagers overview page.

Debian Alioth Migration

Debian has migrated several services from our aged Alioth server, which ran FusionForge, onto Salsa, based on Gitlab software. These changes to our infrastructure will allow us to continue to provide needed services, and tools for collaboration. Alexander Wirt gave a talk about the state of affairs for Salsa at the miniDebConf 2018 in Hamburg.

New and noteworthy packages

Among many other packages that were added to the unstable Debian archive in the past weeks, we can find:

Noteworthy packages in stable

Events: Upcoming and Reports

Upcoming events

Debian Bug Squashing Party in Brooklyn, New York, US

On 24 June 2018 The NYC Debian User Group will hold a Bug Squashing Party in Brooklyn, New York. For more information view the invite page and RSVP if interested.

DebConf18 in Hsinshu

The 19th Annual Debian Conference will be held in Hsinchu, Taiwan, from July 29 to August 5, 2018. It will be preceded by DebCamp, July 21 to July 27, and Open Day, July 28.

DebConf19 in Curitiba

DebConf 19 will be held in Curitiba, Brazil on July 2019. The DebConf 19 organization team recently announced the logo contest winner.

Event Reports

A Debian Women Meeting took place in Curitiba, Brazil on 10th March 2018. Details of the event and schedule are on their website and wiki page. Photos are available.

A miniDebConf took place in Curitiba, Brazil on 11–14 April 2018. Details of the event, schedule, and photos are on their website. There were live video streams, and the recordings are already available.

A miniDebConf took place in Hamburg, Germany on 19–20 May 2018. Details of the event, schedule, and photos are on their wiki page. There were live video streams, and the recordings are already available.

Reports

LTS Freexian Monthly Reports

Freexian issues monthly reports about the work of paid contributors to Debian Long Term Support.

Freexian’s report about Debian Long Term Support, February 2018. 196 work hours were dispatched among 12 paid contributors. The security tracker listed 60 packages with a known CVE and the dla-needed.txt file 33.

Freexian’s report about Debian Long Term Support, March 2018. 214 work hours were dispatched among 13 paid contributors. The security tracker listed 31 packages with a known CVE and the dla-needed.txt file 26.

Freexian’s report about Debian Long Term Support, April 2018. 183 work hours were dispatched among 13 paid contributors. The security tracker listed 20 packages with a known CVE and the dla-needed.txt file 16.

Reproducible Builds status update

Follow the Reproducible Builds blog to get the weekly reports on their work in the Buster cycle.

Reproducible Builds report #159. Ricardo Wurmus also published a paper titled "Reproducible bioinformatics pipelines with Guix" which outlines using GNU Guix and reproducible builds in general as a “crucial foundation for computational experiments”. 22 package reviews were updated and 36 packages were removed.

Reproducible Builds: Weekly report #160. Migrated the diffoscope.org website to the jenkins.debian.net infrastucture. Updated the reproducible-builds.org website. 134 package reviews were added, 25 packages were updated, and 29 packages were removed.

Reproducible Builds: Weekly report #161. Chris Lamb, Holger Levsen, Jonathan Bustillos Osornio (jathan) and Steven Chamberlain presented on Reproducible Builds at the MiniDebConfHamburg, focusing on the status in Debian Buster. Slides and links to videos are available on our Resources page. 18 package reviews were added, 45 packages were updated, and 41 packages were removed.

Help needed

Teams needing help

Following the recent MiniDebConfHamburg, the subtitles team started to subtitle the talks. The team is looking for help to transcribe, synchronize and review subtitles, as well as for spreading the word! The dedicated wiki page summarizes the status and needs of each video.

Packages needing help:

Currently 1301 packages are orphaned and 158 packages are up for adoption: please visit the complete list of packages which need your help.

Newcomer bugs

Debian has a newcomer bug tag, used to indicate bugs which are suitable for new contributors to use as an entry point to working on specific packages. There are 215 bugs available tagged newcomer.

More than just code

Debian study group / Grupo de estudos de Debian

Helen Koike announces bi-weekly meetings (video call) to study Debian. The group will view and discuss João Eriberto Mota Filho's online packaging course. The meetings will be Portuguese and although the primary audience is for women/diversity, the meetings are open to all who wish to participate. The next scheduled meetings will be today, Thursday June 7 at 8PM and Thursday 21 June at 8PM. Join them on OFTC #debian-mulheres for more information.

Contributors

1339 people and 19 teams are currently listed on the Debian Contributors page for 2018.

Discussions

Debian user Long Wind asked about Wireless failure after stretch installation.

Debian user Harald Dunkel asked, How to view config file changes without running an upgrade?

Debian user mess-mate asked, How to change the system UTF to EU character set?

Once upon a time in Debian:

Quick Links from Debian Social Media

This is an extract from the micronews.debian.org feed, in which we have removed the topics already commented on in this DPN issue. You can skip this section if you already follow micronews.debian.org or the @debian profile in a social network (Pump.io, GNU Social, Mastodon or Twitter). The items are given unformatted and in descending order by date (recent news at the top).

May

April

March

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This issue of Debian Project News was edited by The Publicity Team with contributions from Chris Lamb, Holger Wansing, Jean-Pierre Giraud, Justin B Rye, Paulo Henrique de Lima Santana and and Thomas Vincent..