Debian Project News - April 14, 2014

[Saxman]

------------------------------------------------------------------------
The Debian Project http://www.debian.org/
Debian Project News debian-publicity@lists.debian.org
April 14, 2014 http://www.debian.org/News/weekly/2014/07/
------------------------------------------------------------------------

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

* Results of the DPL elections
* Debsources stats: Historical overview of Debian source code
* Reports from Mini-DebConf Barcelona
* CAcert removed from Debian
* Discussion of a fully functional RTC/VoIP client for "Jessie"
* Interviews
* Other news
* Upcoming events
* New Debian Contributors
* Important Debian Security Advisories
* New and noteworthy packages
* Work-needing packages
* Want to continue reading DPN?


Results of the DPL elections
----------------------------

Lucas Nussbaum has just been reelected by the Debian Developers as the
Debian Project Leader.

"It has been a pleasure and a honor to serve as the Debian Project
Leader for the past year. I am very thankful for having been given the
opportunity to continue for a second term, and I hope that I will be
meeting the project's expectations during the coming year", Lucas said.

His opponent in these elections, Neil McGovern, "[...] would like to
congratulate Lucas for winning the election, and hope that Debian
continues to go from strength to strength".

More information about the result is available in the Debian Project
Leader Elections 2014 page [1]. The new term for the project leader will
start on April 17 and expire on April 17 2015.

1: http://www.debian.org/vote/2014/vote_001


Debsources stats: Historical overview of Debian source code
-----------------------------------------------------------

Stefano Zacchiroli wrote on his blog [2] about the debsources
statistics [3] that he has been working on recently, announcing that
they now draw on an increased statistical basis, including all
historical Debian releases since "Hamm", which was released in 1998. As
for the usefulness of such a laborious documenting task, Stefano points
out that it allows us "to appreciate macro-level evolution trends in
Free Software, over a period of more than 15 years, through the eyes of
a distro that sits at the nice intersection of the eldest, largest, and
most reputed distros." By combining information stored in the Debian
archive [4] and the debsources database [5], the debsources statistics
provide some relevant information about Debian's evolution, such as (for
example) overviews in table and graphical form of the amount of source
code written in the different programming languages used over the years,
thus contributing significantly to what Stefano calls a "long-time
preservation of digital information in general, and for the perennity of
access to Free Software in the specific case of Debian".

2: http://upsilon.cc/~zack/blog/planet-debian
3: http://sources.debian.net/stats
4: http://archive.debian.org/
5: http://sources.debian.net


Reports from Mini-DebConf Barcelona
-----------------------------------

According to the official stats [6], the Barcelona Mini-DebConf held
last March was a great success, especially in terms of participation by
women: of the 160 attendees, 36% were women. Tássia Camões Araújo,
member of the organisation team, explains: "as we didn’t collect gender
information at the registration, it is hard to make a clear comparison
with previous DebConfs. Since 2007, the rate of non-male participants
ranged from 13% to 17%. For this Mini-DebConf, the orga team did the
gender identification per name and found a non-male rate of 36%. Again,
since the methods were not the same we cannot safely compare, but still,
I think it’s worth it to make this info public." Various attendees
wrote [7] enthusiastic [8] reports [9] and the videos of the talks [10]
are already available.

6: http://tassia.wp.acaia.ca/2014/04/02/hello-world/
7: http://social.gl-como.it/display/valhalla/3514
8: http://larjona.wordpress.com/2014/03/31 ... lona-2014/
9: http://blog.zouish.org/posts/bcn14/
10: http://meetings-archive.debian.net/pub/ ... barcelona/


CAcert removed from Debian
--------------------------

Unlike all other certificate authorities, CAcert is a community-driven
certificate authority providing SSL/TLS certificates free of charge. Not
only because of that way of functioning, similar to Debian's approach,
Debian has been shipping the CAcert root certificate since 2005, even
after CAcert had withdrawn its request to be included in Mozilla's
trusted certificate store back in 2007, due to an ongoing internal
audit. Discussion of whether to continue distributing CAcert's root
certificate in Debian's trusted certificate store arose in response to a
bug [11] filed in July 2013 advocating its removal. After months of
debate on the pros and cons it was on March 13 that Michael Shuler, the
maintainer of the ca-certificates package, finally made public the
decision [12] to no longer ship the CAcert root certificate with Debian.
For a detailed summary of the discussion please refer to the LWN article
on the subject [13].

11: http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=718434
12: http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugrepor ... 718434#129
13: https://lwn.net/Articles/590879/


Discussion of a fully functional RTC/VoIP client for "Jessie"
-------------------------------------------------------------

Based on the assessment [14] made by Empathy's package maintainer, Simon
Vittie, that Empathy has an Instant Messaging background rather than
being very suited for voice and video, Daniel Pocock has kicked off a
discussion on his website [14] about the convenience of choosing a new
WebRTC-compliant RTC/VoIP client for Debian 8 "Jessie". Arguing that any
suitable client will need to support the open WebRTC standard that has
been embedded in all Firefox/Iceweasel and Chromium/Chrome browsers for
more than a year now, Daniel gives a detailed comparison of Empathy and
Jitsi, concluding that in his view, the latter would be the best choice
for "Jessie".

14: http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/20 ... 00640.html


Interviews
----------

There has been a "DebianEdu interview" [15] with Roger Marsal [16] (in
English) who describes, among other things, how he got involved in
Debian Edu and his views about it.

15: http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/intervju/
16: http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/ ... arsal.html


Other news
----------

Tails [17] is a Debian-derivative live system aiming at preserving the
privacy and anonymity of its users by making use by default of the TOR
network [18] and cryptographic tools. There is currently a fundraising
campaign [19] for Tails and other related free software projects, so
they can stay ahead of the security curve.

17: https://tails.boum.org/
18: https://www.torproject.org/
19: https://pressfreedomfoundation.org/blog ... orting-nsa

Exactly 16 years after the first announcement [20], the APT development
team [21] announced the release of version 1.0 of APT [22], the high
level package management tool. This release now provides a /usr/bin/apt
binary, intended as an end user interface.

20: http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/19 ... 00027.html
21: https://wiki.debian.org/Teams/Apt
22: http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/20 ... 00013.html

Holger Levsen announced [23] the creation of the Debian OTR team [24],
maintaining various packages related to "Off-the-Record" messaging which
provides encryption, authentication, deniability and Perfect Forward
Secrecy. The team welcomes any contribution, from bug reporting and
triaging, to bugfixing, packaging and backporting.

23: http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-an ... 00000.html
24: http://wiki.debian.org/Teams/OTR

Francesca Ciceri sent some bits [25] from the DebConf Subtitle
Team [26]. The team now provides subtitles for 10 talks from DebConf 13.
Now that the videos of the Barcelona Mini-DebConf are available, the
team is calling for volunteers to help subbing them. Contributions to
the team are now registered in the Debian Contributors list [27].

25: http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-an ... 00002.html
26: http://wiki.debconf.org/wiki/Videoteam/Subtitles
27: http://contributors.debian.org


Upcoming events
---------------

There is one upcoming Debian-related event:

* 25-27 April, Salzburg, Austria — Debian Bug Squashing Party [28] in the offices of conova communications GmbH [29]

28: http://wiki.debian.org/BSP/2014/04/at/Salzburg
29: http://www.conova.com/de/kontakt/anfahrtsplan-salzburg/

You can find more information about Debian-related events and talks on
the events section [30] of the Debian web site, or subscribe to one of
our events mailing lists for different regions: Europe [31],
Netherlands [32], Hispanic America [33], North America [34].

30: http://www.debian.org/events
31: http://lists.debian.org/debian-events-eu
32: http://lists.debian.org/debian-events-nl
33: http://lists.debian.org/debian-events-ha
34: http://lists.debian.org/debian-events-na

Do you want to organise a Debian booth or a Debian install party? Are
you aware of other upcoming Debian-related events? Have you delivered a
Debian talk that you want to link on our talks page [35]? Send an email
to the Debian Events Team [36].

35: http://www.debian.org/events/talks
36: events@debian.org


New Debian Contributors
-----------------------

10 people have started to maintain packages [37] since the previous
issue of the Debian Project News. Please welcome Denis Laxalde, Sean
Davis, Helge Deller, Christoph Ender, Oliver Lindemann, Guilhem Moulin,
Barry Warsaw, Matt Fischer, Steve Capper, and Matthew Pideil into our
project!

37: http://udd.debian.org/cgi-bin/new-maintainers.cgi


Important Debian Security Advisories
------------------------------------

Debian's Security Team recently released advisories for these packages
(among others): libspring-java [38], mediawiki [39], a2ps [40],
openswan [41], openssh [42], prosody and lua-expat [43], openssl [44],
tomcat7 [45], imagemagick [46], openafs [47], and jbigkit [48]. Please
read them carefully and take the proper measures.

38: http://www.debian.org/security/2014/dsa-2890
39: http://www.debian.org/security/2014/dsa-2891
40: http://www.debian.org/security/2014/dsa-2892
41: http://www.debian.org/security/2014/dsa-2893
42: http://www.debian.org/security/2014/dsa-2894
43: http://www.debian.org/security/2014/dsa-2895
44: http://www.debian.org/security/2014/dsa-2896
45: http://www.debian.org/security/2014/dsa-2897
46: http://www.debian.org/security/2014/dsa-2898
47: http://www.debian.org/security/2014/dsa-2899
48: http://www.debian.org/security/2014/dsa-2900

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 [49] (and the separate backports
list [50], and stable updates list [51]) for announcements.

49: http://lists.debian.org/debian-security-announce/
50: http://lists.debian.org/debian-backports-announce/
51: http://lists.debian.org/debian-stable-announce/


New and noteworthy packages
---------------------------

230 packages were added to the unstable Debian archive recently. Among
many others [52] are:

* birdfont — font editor that lets you create outline vector graphics and export fonts [53]
* blockfinder — tool to enumerate network information for countries [54]
* debci — continuous integration system for Debian [55]
* mate-session-manager — MATE Session Manager [56]
* palo — Linux boot loader for HP PA-RISC [57]
* wavtool-pl — tool to concatenate wav files [58]

52: http://packages.debian.org/unstable/main/newpkg
53: http://packages.debian.org/unstable/main/birdfont
54: http://packages.debian.org/unstable/main/blockfinder
55: http://packages.debian.org/unstable/main/debci
56: http://packages.debian.org/unstable/mai ... on-manager
57: http://packages.debian.org/unstable/main/palo
58: http://packages.debian.org/unstable/main/wavtool-pl


Work-needing packages
---------------------

Currently [59] 568 packages are orphaned [60] and 134 packages are up
for adoption [61]: please visit the complete list of packages which need
your help [62].

59: http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/20 ... 00272.html
60: http://www.debian.org/devel/wnpp/orphaned
61: http://www.debian.org/devel/wnpp/rfa
62: http://www.debian.org/devel/wnpp/help_requested


Want to continue reading DPN?
-----------------------------

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 [63] to find out how to help. We're
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<debian-publicity@lists.debian.org>.

63: http://wiki.debian.org/ProjectNews/HowToContribute


This issue of Debian Project News was edited by Laura Arjona, Stephan
Beck, Cédric Boutillier, Jean-Pierre Giraud, Justin B Rye and Paul Wise.

[novalix]

Wow,
apt ist 1.0!
Ein schönes decorum. Die Entwickler und Maintainer haben ein Glas Wein bei mir gut..