Debian Project News - July 16th, 2022

Welcome to the Debian Project News!

Welcome to this year's first issue of DPN, the newsletter for the Debian community.

We hope that you enjoy this edition of the DPN.

DebConf22 is underway!

After two online editions in 2020 and 2021, the annual Debian Conference returns to its usual format: DebConf22 is being held in Prizren, Kosovo from Sunday 17th to Sunday 24th July 2022.

The full schedule includes 45-minute and 20-minute talks and team meetings ("BoF"), workshops, and a job fair, as well as a variety of other events. Video streaming will also be available from the DebConf22 website.

You can also follow the live coverage of news about DebConf22 on https://micronews.debian.org or the @debian profile in your favorite social network.

Debian thanks the commitment of numerous sponsors to support DebConf22, particularly our Platinum Sponsors: Lenovo, Infomaniak, ITP Prizren and Google.

Bookworm freeze dates (preliminary)

The development of the next Debian release continues and the Debian Release Team has proposed a timeline for its freeze:

January 2023 (2023-01-12): Milestone 1 - Transition and toolchain freeze
February 2023 (2023-02-12): Milestone 2 - Soft Freeze
March 2023 (2023-03-12): Milestone 3 - Hard Freeze - for key packages and packages without autopkgtests
To be announced: Milestone 4 - Full Freeze

Other topics covered in this issue include:

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 too.

Important Debian Security Advisories

Debian's Security Team releases current advisories on a daily basis (Security Advisories 2022). Please read them carefully and subscribe to the security mailing list to keep your systems updated against any vulnerabilities. On 1st November 2021, the Debian Security Advisory number #5000 was published. Thanks Security Team for the continuous effort and support all these years!

Some recently released advisories concern these packages: mat2, xen, wpewebkit, webkit2gtk, request-tracker4, chromium, php7.4, intel-microcode, ldap-account-manager, blender, thunderbird, gnupg2.

The Debian website also archives the security advisories issued by the Debian Long Term Support team and posted to the debian-lts-announce mailing list.

News on Debian bullseye and buster

Updated Debian 11 and Debian 10: 11.4 and 10.12 released

Since the initial release on 14 August 2021, the Debian project issued four updates of its stable distribution Debian 11 (codename bullseye), the last one announced on 9 July 2022.

The Debian project also announced the twelfth update of its oldstable distribution Debian 10 (codename Buster) on 23 March 2022 to point release 10.12.

These point releases added corrections for security issues along with a few adjustments for serious problems. Security advisories have already been published separately and are referenced where available. Upgrading an existing installation to either 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

News on Debian LTS

The Debian Long Term Support (LTS) Team announced that Debian 9 stretch support has reached its end-of-life on July 1, 2022. A subset of packages will be supported from now on by external parties (detailed information can be found at Extended LTS).

The LTS team will take over support for Debian 10 buster from the Security Team during August, while the final point update for buster will be released during that month. Debian 10 will also receive Long Term Support for five years after its initial release with support ending on June 30, 2024.

More than 1,000,000 bugs reported

The 18th of November of 2021, at 12:06:14 UTC, Debian hit the mark with bug # 1,000,000. Thank you to all of our Developers, Contributors, and users who helped us reach (and fix) this milestone.

Debian Project elections and votes

Several decisions have been taken with the Debian General Resolution process and other type of elections in the last months, and some other discussions or decisions are planned for the following months. Here you can find a quick summary of them:

General Resolution: Change the resolution process

After a period of proposals and discussions initiated in 2021, the project has officially adopted several changes in the Debian Constitution in order to amend the resolution process on January 2022. These constitutional changes attempt to address several issues detected by separating the Technical Committee process from the General Resolution process since they have different needs, setting a maximum discussion period for resolution, extending the general resolution discussion period automatically if the ballot changes, modifying the GR process to treat all ballot options equally and other process improvements or clarifications.

All the information about this vote is in the web page about this general resolution and the changes in the were applied producing the version 1.8 of the Debian Constitution.

General Resolution: Voting secrecy

After a period of proposals and discussions initiated, the project has officially adopted a change in the Debian Constitution in order to hide identities of Developers casting a particular vote and allow verification. All the information about this vote is in the web page about this general resolution.

Debian Project Leader election 2022: Jonathan Carter reelected

Jonathan Carter has been has been re-elected for a new term. He sent a Bits from the DPL message in April and a new update about the project leader tasks is scheduled for the first day of DebConf22.

Open discussion about Firmware

Steve McIntyre initiated a discussion within the project in order to gather opinions and proposals about how to improve firmware support in Debian. The interchange of ideas and opinions still continues and there is a BoF session in DebConf22 dedicated to this topic. The progress in the process of arriving to a decision may involve a General Resolution proposal in the future, in order to get a clear mandate of the project on how to proceed.

Debian Outreach activities

Debian continues participating in Outreachy and Google Summer of Code programs, and we're excited to announce that two interns will improve Yarn package manager integration with Debian for the Outreachy May 2022 - August 2022 round, and three interns will improve Android SDK Tools in Debian and Quality Assurance for Biological and Medical Applications inside Debian for the Google Summer of Code 2022 edition.

During DebConf22's DebCamp a BootCamp has been prepared to welcome and help newcomers to get introduced to Debian and have some hands-on experience using our belove operating system and contributing to the project.

If you'd like to help in the efforts to extend Debian and make it more diverse, don't hesitate to join the Debian Outreach team! You can follow the day-to-day of the new contributors and organization of the programs on the debian-outreach mailing-list and chat with us on our #debian-outreach IRC channel. You can also have a look or join other teams related to extending the community: the Debian Local Groups (focused on supporting Local Groups initiatives with infrastructure, goodies, sharing ideas etc), the Welcome team, focused in help newcomers find their way to start using Debian or contributing to the project, and of course Debian Mentors to support people starting to contribute to Debian in packaging or infrastructure areas.

BSPs, Events, MiniDebCamps, and MiniDebConfs

Upcoming events

Next Tuesday 16th of August 2022 the Debian community will celebrate Debian's 29th birthday. Some events are already scheduled, have a look at the related wiki page to learn about them or add your Debian Day party to the list to let others know about your local DebianDay celebration.

There will be a Debian presentation booth shared with Debian Edu at FrOSCon, August 20th/21st, 2022 in Sankt Augustin, Germany.

From 14th to 16th October 2022, a Bug Squashing Party will be held in Karlsrhue, hosted (and generously sponsored by) Unicon GmbH in view of the first step of bookworm freeze scheduled for the beginning of 2023. To ease the organisation of the event, you're kindly asked to register on the wiki page if interested.

Past events

The MiniDebConf 2021 Regensburg, Germany, took place on October 2nd-3rd 2021. With over 55 people attending and more than 20 talks and lightning talks, this event was a real success. The video recordings are available.

Debian had a virtual stand at FOSDEM 2022 held online on February 5th–6th 2022.

The Debian Clojure Team held a two days remote sprint, on May 13th-14th 2022, involving five of its members to improve various aspects of the Clojure ecosystem in Debian.

The eagerly awaited Debian Reunion Hamburg 2022 was held from monday 23th May to 30th May 2022 starting by five days of hacking followed by two days of talks. People - more than sixty attendees - were happy to meet in person, to hack and chat together, and much more. For those who missed the live streams, the video recordings are available.

During the Debian Reunion, three members of the Debian Perl Group met in an (Unofficial) Debian Perl Sprint to continue perl development work for Bookworm and to work on QA tasks across their 3800+ packages.

Reports

LTS Freexian Monthly Reports

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

Reproducible Builds status update

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

Help needed

Packages needing help:

Currently 1261 packages are orphaned and 180 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 currently 199 bugs available tagged newcomer.

Code, coders, and contributors

New Package Maintainers since 18 March 2021

Please welcome: Ganesh Pawar, Job Snijders, Hugo Torres de Lima, Saakshi Jain, Ajayi Olatunji, Eberhard Beilharz, Ayoyimika Ajibade, Mingyu Wu, Imre Jonk, harish chavre, Jan Gru, Felix C. Stegerman, Kai-Heng Feng, Brian Thompson, Heinrich Schuchardt, Alex David, Cézar Augusto de Campos, Antoine Le Gonidec, Fabrice Creuzot, Pavit Kaur, Mickael Asseline, Lin Qigang, Takuma Shibuya, Daniel Duan, karthek, Tom Teichler, Marius Vlad, Dave Lambley, Dave Jones, Jan Gruber, Erik Maciejewski, Daniel Salzman, Caleb Adepitan, Faustin Lammler, Linus Vanas, Prateek Ganguli, Tian Qiao, Taavi Väänänen, Andrea Pappacoda, Carsten Schoenert, Ricardo Brandao, Joshua Peisach, Filip Strömbäck, Victor Raphael Santos Souza, Luiz Amaral, Roman Lebedev, Paolo Pisati, S. 7, Frédéric Danis, Mark King, Ben Westover, Chris Talbot, Bartek Fabiszewski, Matteo Bini, Lance Lin, Shlomi Fish, William 'jawn-smith' Wilson, Carlos F. Sanz, Ileana Dumitrescu, Marcus Hardt, Victor Westerhuis, Christophe Maudoux, Agathe Porte, Martin Dosch, Krzysztof Aleksander Pyrkosz, Hannes Matuschek, Lourisvaldo Figueredo Junior, Thomas E. Dickey, Ruffin White, Chris MacNaughton, Ed J, Thiago Pezzo, Matthieu Baerts, Ryan Gonzalez, Maxim W., Katharina Drexel, Josenilson Ferreira da Silva, Felix Dörre, Fukui Daichi, Timon Engelke, Maxime Chambonnet, Christopher Obbard, Martin Guenther, Nick Rosbrook, Daniel Grittner, Bo Yu, Michael Ikwuegbu, Heather Ellsworth, Israel Galadima, Francois Gindraud, Tobias Heider, Leandro Ramos, Erik Hulsmann, Sebastian Crane, Eivind Naess, Vignesh Raman, clesia_roberto, Jack Toh, Calvin Wan, Matthias Geiger, Robert Greener, Lena Voytek, Glen Choo, Helmar Gerloni, Vinay Keshava, Michel Alexandre Salim, Lev Borodin, Fab Stz, Matt Barry, Travis Wrightsman, Nathan Pratta Teodosio, Philippe Swartvagher, Dennis Filder, Robin Alexander, Christoph Hueffelmann, David Heidelberg, Juri Grabowski, Anupa Ann Joseph, Aaron Rainbolt, and Braulio Henrique Marques Souto.

New Debian Maintainers

Please welcome: Markus Schade, Jakub Ružička, Evangelos Ribeiro Tzaras, Hugh McMaster, Douglas Andrew Torrance, Marcel Fourné, Marcos Talau, Sebastian Geiger, Clay Stan, Daniel Milde, David da Silva Polverari, Sunday Cletus Nkwuda, Ma Aiguo, Sakirnth Nagarasa, Lukas Matthias Märdian, Paulo Roberto Alves de Oliveira, Sergio Almeida Cipriano Junior, Julien Lamy, Kristian Nielsen, Jeremy Paul Arnold Sowden, Jussi Tapio Pakkanen, Marius Gripsgard, Martin Budaj, Peymaneh, Tommi Petteri Höynälänmaa, Lu YaNing, Mathias Gibbens, Markus Blatt, Peter Blackman, Jan Mojžíš, Philip Wyett, Thomas Ward, Fabio Fantoni, Mohammed Bilal, and Guilherme de Paula Xavier Segundo.

New Debian Developers

Please welcome: Jeroen Ploemen, Mark Hindley, Scarlett Moore, Baptiste Beauplat, Gunnar Ingemar Hjalmarsson, Stephan Lachnit, Timo Röhling, Patrick Franz, Christian Ehrhardt, Fabio Augusto De Muzio Tobich, Taowa, Félix Sipma, Étienne Mollier, Daniel Swarbrick, Hanno Wagner, Aloïs Micard, Sophie Brun, Bastian Germann, Gürkan Myczko, Douglas Andrew Torrance, Mark Lee Garrett, Francisco Vilmar Cardoso Ruviaro , Henry-Nicolas Tourneur, and Nick Black.

Contributors

1064 people and 10 teams are currently listed on the Debian Contributors page for 2022.

Quick Links from Debian Social Media

This is an extract from the micronews.debian.org feed in 2022, 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 provided unformatted in descending order by date (recent news at the top).

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This issue of Debian Project News was edited by The Publicity Team with contributions from Laura Arjona Reina and Jean-Pierre Giraud.