gmane.linux.debian.devel.announce

General Resolution: Diversity statement, first call for votes

Debian Project Secretary - Kurt Roeckx — 2012-05-19T23:51:03

Hi,

This is the first call for votes for the General Resolution about
a diversity statement.

     Voting period starts      00:00:00 UTC on Sunday,   May  20th, 2012
     Votes must be received by 23:59:59 UTC on Saturday, June  2nd, 2012

The following ballot is for voting on a diversity statement.
This vote is being conducted as required by the Debian Constitution.
You may see the constitution at http://www.debian.org/devel/constitution.
For voting questions or problems contact secretary< at >debian.org.

The details of the general resolution can be found at:
http://www.debian.org/vote/2012/vote_002

Also, note that you can get a fresh ballot any time before the end of
the vote by sending a signed mail to
   ballot< at >vote.debian.org
with the subject "diversity".

HOW TO VOTE

First, read the full text of the platform.

To cast a vote, it is necessary to send this ballot filled out to a
dedicated e-mail address, in a signed message, as described below.
The dedicated email address this ballot should be sent to is

Bits from the Release Team: Freeze approaching!

Cyril Brulebois — 2012-05-13T20:45:36

Freeze planning
===============

As you might remember, we are aiming at a freeze in June.  The exact
date has not been determined yet. However, given the large amount of
work remaining, we are now targeting a freeze in the *second half of
June*.

If there is something you really believe should be in Wheezy and you
expect that it will not be ready before we freeze, please contact us
*now*.


RC Bugs
=======

There are now over 1000 release-critical bugs and we really need your
help to fix them. The RC bug list is at [RCBUGS]. Note that in previous
releases the RC bug count has been below 500 before a freeze occurs, so
freezing with a higher number will simply make the release process
longer.


Transitions
===========

We have many planned transitions already.  However, in case you would
like to do a transition in Wheezy please file a bug against
release.debian.org now (i.e. not tomorrow)[TRANS]. Please note that this
does *not* guarantee they will be processed in time for the freeze.

After Sunday the 20th o

Debian Installer 7.0 Alpha1 release

Cyril Brulebois — 2012-05-13T13:55:43

The Debian Installer team[1] is pleased to announce the first alpha
release of the installer for Debian Wheezy.


Improvements in this release of the installer
=============================================

Network configuration
---------------------
 * Add WPA support to installer (#327309).
 * Improvements in link detection and DHCP configuration, which
   should improve reliability for systems with flaky network
   cards (#496647, #414117, #606515).
 * Release DHCP lease at the end of the install, to work around
   problems with non-RFC compliant DHCP servers (#610553).
 * The requirements for hostnames have been clarified, and the
   parser tightened up to avoid letting through some really
   dodgy names (#399071).
 * Added Spanning Tree Protocol (STP) support.

Linux Specific
--------------
 * Kernel version has been updated to 3.2.16.
 * Default filesystem changed to ext4.
 * Allow Btrfs /boot partition (GRUB 2 and LILO).
 * Add support for Network Block Devices (NBD).

kFreeBSD Specific
--------------

General Resolution: Diversity statement

Debian Project Secretary - Kurt Roeckx — 2012-05-08T21:28:31

Hi,

A new General Resolution has been started about a diversity
statement.

More details are at:
http://www.debian.org/vote/2012/vote_002



Kurt

(overlapping) bits from the DPL: April 2012

Stefano Zacchiroli — 2012-05-06T16:54:41

Dear project members,
  last bits of the past DPL term and first bits of the current term, all
in one. Here is a report of what has happened in DPL land last April.


Highlight: call for DPL helpers
===============================

Before the report, though, let me point out that your friendly
neighborhood DPL could use some help. As discussed during campaign,
there are some intrinsic transparency and scalability limits in the DPL
institution, when run by a single person. Before trying something new to
fix that, I'd like to give a last try to an old "tactic": calling for
help.  If you're considering running for DPL or if you're simply
interested in the job the DPL does and willing to help with that, please
let me know.  Ideally, if I find a group of people I'm happy to work
with, I'd like to set up periodic IRC meetings with all "DPL helpers" to
publicly discuss items in the DPL agenda and share the work-load.


Ongoing discussions
===================

A big topic of last month has been the proposal [1] by F

New archive key for wheezy generated

Joerg Jaspert — 2012-05-01T20:59:28

Hi,

I just had the pleasure of generating a new key for the archive.

This key will *NOT* be put into use immediately, it has been generated
now so that it can already be included in Wheezy and in a future point
release of Squeeze. We will start using this key with one of:

 - the release of Wheezy
 - the expiry of the old key, 0x473041FA (2018-03-05)

whichever comes first.

The key data:
pub   4096R/46925553 2012-04-27 [expires: 2020-04-25]
uid                  Debian Archive Automatic Signing Key (7.0/wheezy) <ftpmaster< at >debian.org>
sig!3        46925553 2012-04-27  Debian Archive Automatic Signing Key (7.0/wheezy) <ftpmaster< at >debian.org>
sig!3        7E7B8AC9 2012-04-27  Joerg Jaspert <joerg< at >debian.org>
sig!3   P    B12525C4 2012-04-27  Joerg Jaspert <joerg< at >debian.org>
   Signature policy: string
   Signature policy: http://gpg.ganneff.de/policy.txt
sig!         A3AE44A4 2012-04-27  Michael O'Connor (stew) <stew< at >vireo.org>
sig!         CA1CF964 2012-04-27  Ansgar Burchardt <ansgar< at >debian.org>
sig!

(deferred) bits from the DPL: March 2012

Stefano Zacchiroli — 2012-04-15T18:19:09

Dear project members,
  here is my monthly DPL activity report, this time for last March. It
is delayed by a couple of weeks because, myself being both incumbent and
candidate DPL, I preferred not to use d-d-a during the voting period
unless really needed. Apologies for the delay (or the unneeded paranoia,
you name it).

As a side effect of the delay, the results of the DPL election are now
known. I'd like to thank all the people who took part in the elections:
voters, people who asked questions on -vote, the secretary, and
obviously Gergely and Wouter, without whom the campaign wouldn't have
allowed to discuss relevant aspects of Debian "politics".

Thanks for your trust. I'll do my best to match your expectations.

... and just to remind you what you've just asked for, here goes the
BigMonthlyBlurb!


Highlight: long-term hardware replacement planning
==================================================

The highlight for this month is long term planning of hardware
replacement. It's something I've been disc

Debian Project Leader Election 2012 Results

Debian Project Secretary - Kurt Roeckx — 2012-04-15T12:16:00

Hi,

The winner of the election is Stefano Zacchiroli.

His new term will start on April 17th, 2012.

The details of the results shall soon be available at:
http://vote.debian.org/2012/vote_001

In the mean time the results are also available at:
http://master.debian.org/~secretary/leader2012/results.txt
http://master.debian.org/~secretary/leader2012/results.png

The tally sheet is at:
http://master.debian.org/~secretary/leader2012/tally.txt

The list of people voting is at:
http://master.debian.org/~secretary/leader2012/voters.txt


Stats for the DPL votes:
|------+------+--------+-------+--------+---------+--------+-----------|
|      |  Num |        | Valid | Unique | Rejects |      % |  Multiple |
| Year |  DDs | Quorum | Votes | Voters |         | Voting | of Quorum |
|------+------+--------+-------+--------+---------+--------+-----------|
| 1999 |  347 | 27.942 |       |    208 |         | 59.942 |   7.44399 |
| 2000 |  347 | 27.942 |       |    216 |         | 62.248 |   7.73030 |
| 2001 |   ?? |

Debian Project Leader Elections 2012: Last call for votes

Debian Project Secretary - Kurt Roeckx — 2012-04-13T18:58:14

Hi,

The voting period for the Debian Project Leader election 2012 is
almost over.  You still have about 29 hours from the time of this
writing.

The timeline is:

     Voting period starts      00:00:00 UTC on Sunday,   April  1st, 2012
     Votes must be received by 23:59:59 UTC on Saturday, April 14th, 2012

This vote is being conducted as required by the Debian Constitution.
You may see the constitution at http://www.debian.org/devel/constitution.
For voting questions or problems contact secretary< at >debian.org.

The details of the candidate platform can be found at:
http://www.debian.org/vote/2012/platforms/

Also, note that you can get a fresh ballot any time before the end of
the vote by sending a mail to
   ballot< at >vote.debian.org
with the subject "leader2012".


HOW TO VOTE

First, read the full text of the platform.

To cast a vote, it is necessary to send this ballot filled out to a
dedicated e-mail address, in a signed message, as described below.
The dedicated email address this ballot should be se

Call for Papers DebConf12 in Managua, Nicaragua

Gunnar Wolf — 2012-04-11T22:04:56

Debian invites submissions of proposals for papers, presentations,
discussion sessions and tutorials for its DebConf12 conference which
will take place in Managua, Nicaragua, in July.

Submissions are not limited to traditional talks: you could propose a
performance, art installation, debate, or anything else. Official
submissions will be accepted until 1 June 2012, 23:59 UTC.

This year submission of a formal written paper for the conference
proceedings is again optional, though encouraged. Providing a written
paper in advance means that interested people can attend your session
ready with ideas for discussion, and especially helps those who find
it hard to follow rapid English speech.

DebConf talks will be broadcast live on the internet when possible,
and videos of the talks will be published on the web along with the
presentation slides and papers. Regular sessions will be 45 minutes
long, including time for questions, with a 15 minute break between
events.

This year, we will continue to organize some t

Registration is open for DebConf12

Gunnar Wolf — 2012-04-11T22:02:09

Registration is now open for DebConf12, which will take place in
Managua, Nicaragua, from Sunday 8 July to Saturday 14 July 2012,
preceded as usual by one week of DebCamp, from Sunday 1 July to
Saturday 7 July.

To register, follow one of the processes outlined below:

- If you registered for a previous DebConf via Pentabarf, go to
  https://penta.debconf.org/penta/submission/dc12/person to login.
  DebConf has used Pentabarf since DebConf7 in 2007.

- If you have not registered for DebConf before, you will first need
  to create an account in the conference management system.  Use
  https://penta.debconf.org/penta/user to create your account. After
  visiting the activation URL sent to you by email, go to
  https://penta.debconf.org/penta/submission/dc12/person and log in.


After you have logged in
------------------------

After you have successfully logged in, please fill in at least the
'General', 'Contact' and 'Travel' tabs reachable through the
'Registration details' button on the bar on the left of t

Debian Project Leader Elections 2012: Second call for votes

Kurt Roeckx — 2012-04-07T13:39:09

Hi,

This is the second call for votes for the Debian Project Leader
Elections 2012.

     Voting period starts      00:00:00 UTC on Sunday,   April  1st, 2012
     Votes must be received by 23:59:59 UTC on Saturday, April 14th, 2012

This vote is being conducted as required by the Debian Constitution.
You may see the constitution at http://www.debian.org/devel/constitution.
For voting questions or problems contact secretary< at >debian.org.

The details of the candidate platform can be found at:
http://www.debian.org/vote/2012/platforms/

Also, note that you can get a fresh ballot any time before the end of
the vote by sending a signed mail to
   ballot< at >vote.debian.org
with the subject "leader2012".


HOW TO VOTE

First, read the full text of the platform.

To cast a vote, it is necessary to send this ballot filled out to a
dedicated e-mail address, in a signed message, as described below.
The dedicated email address this ballot should be sent to is:

  leader2012< at >vote.debian.org

The form you need to fill out i

Bits from the 5th Debian Groupware Meeting

Guido Günther — 2012-04-03T18:34:44

The fifth Debian Groupware Meeting[1] was held in the LinuxHotel, Essen,
Germany[2]. Eight persons attended which is an all time high! This is a
short summary of what happened during the weekend:

* We pushed a ESR version of icedove including l10n and the calendaring
  extension to unstable. By cherry-picking lots of build-fixes from
  iceweasel we'll hopefully make the testing transition soon.

* Since iceowl (the standalone calendar) is not maintained upstream
  anymore we're keeping it in experimental only for now. A new version
  got uploaded including updated l10n.

* A new upstream version of evolution-mapi was upload to sid fixing
  an FTBFS.

* d-push 1.5.8 (the rebranded version of z-push) got uploaded to
  unstable including translation updates and adaption to php 5.4.0.

* Lots of progress was made on packaging SOGo and related components and
  it's now quiet close to an upload to sid.

* Work on OpenChange included looking into using the version in Debian 
  for SOGo packaging as well as fixing

Debian Project Leader Elections 2012: Call for votes

Kurt Roeckx — 2012-03-31T23:36:39

Hi,

This is the first call for votes for the Debian Project Leader
Elections 2012.

     Voting period starts      00:00:00 UTC on Sunday,   April  1st, 2012
     Votes must be received by 23:59:59 UTC on Saturday, April 14th, 2012

This vote is being conducted as required by the Debian Constitution.
You may see the constitution at http://www.debian.org/devel/constitution.
For voting questions or problems contact secretary< at >debian.org.

The details of the candidate platform can be found at:
http://www.debian.org/vote/2012/platforms/

Also, note that you can get a fresh ballot any time before the end of
the vote by sending a signed mail to
   ballot< at >vote.debian.org
with the subject "leader2012".


HOW TO VOTE

First, read the full text of the platform.

To cast a vote, it is necessary to send this ballot filled out to a
dedicated e-mail address, in a signed message, as described below.
The dedicated email address this ballot should be sent to is:

  leader2012< at >vote.debian.org

The form you need to fill out is

Report from the Front desk and DAM sprint

Jan Hauke Rahm — 2012-03-26T06:00:48

Hello everyone,

I'm happy to tell you that we not only survived a front desk and DAM
meeting a little while ago but also continued on the course we set
there. [1] Thanks to the generous hosting of Credativ in
Mönchengladbach, Germany, we were able to meet and finally start out on
the last bits of work needed to get our new web interface production
ready. [2] Let us give you some insight in what we did there and since
then.


The new new New Members web interface
=====================================

If you've followed what the team, Enrico in particular, has been doing
in the last months, you'll know that there was some intention to replace
the current NM web interface. [3] Due to security concerns that were
brought to public attention just recently [4], we decided that it's time
to actually replace the code.

During the meeting we re-discussed the database layout improving it in
several ways. Using Django, Enrico implemented the models, data
migration and maintenance scripts -- basically the complete bac

Bits from the Apache Maintainers / Upcoming apache2 2.4 transition

Stefan Fritsch — 2012-03-22T00:05:16

This is the first "Bits from the Apache Maintainers" announcement 
ever. There are lots of changes coming up and following a well-
established practice we are going to announce some of them here.

In this update:
-  New Apache HTTPD 2.4 available in experimental <HTTPD24>
-  Package Transition <TRANSITION>
-  Packaging Guidelines <GUIDELINES>
-  Call For Help <HELP>


New HTTPD 2.4 available in experimental <HTTPD24>
=================================================

A major Apache HTTPD upgrade has been released in February. A brief 
overview of new features is available at [1]. Some of the changes have 
major impacts of the Debian packaging. Notably, all Multi Processing 
Modules (MPM), which were compiled as separate apache2 executables 
previously, can now be loaded as simple modules. This implies that the 
conflicting MPM packages like apache2-mpm-prefork are gone. Instead, 
users can pick the MPM they wish at runtime in future. Moreover, there 
some incompatible changes in the configuration which makes

First Debian Bug Squashing Party in Salzburg (Austria) - 15-17 June 2012

Bernd Zeimetz — 2012-03-21T19:04:45

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA256

Hi,

we are happy to invite you to the first Debian Bug Squashing Party in
Salzburg, Austria, on the weekend of 15-17 June, 2012 [BSPSBG].
As Wheezy will be frozen in June there will be a lot to work on for sure!

The BSP will be held in the office of conova communications GmbH [CONOVA],
located close to Salzburg Airport W.A. Mozart. A short registration on the
wiki page [BSPSBG] is required to ease the organization of the event. On
the same page you will find information regarding transport, accommodation
and other useful things.

[BSPSBG] http://wiki.debian.org/BSP/2012/06/at/Salzburg
[CONOVA] http://www.conova.com/de/kontakt/anfahrtsplan-salzburg/


Thanks to Debian funds we have sponsored accommodation for those who
are not able to pay for it on their own. Please contact me by mail
if you would like to use that offer!

Even if you are not a Debian Developer or Contributor yet, but interested
in fixing bugs and helping Debian, don't hesitate to come! There

delegation for the Press Team

Stefano Zacchiroli — 2012-03-21T15:32:54

Dear Developers,
  the Press Team is changing! Francesca Ciceri and Neil McGovern have
accepted the promotion from assistants to press officers. At the same
time, Alexander Reichle-Schmehl and Meike Reichle have decided to step
down from the team, after many years of tireless contributions.

Please join me in welcoming our new press overl{adies,ords}, as well as
in thanking Alexander and Meike for their numerous past contributions.

We have also took this chance to clarify the role and responsibilities
of the press team. The "job description" is reported below, as part of
the formal delegation.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

Press Team delegation
=====================

I hereby appoint the following developers as members of the Debian Press
Team:

- Francesca Ciceri <madamezou>
- Martin Schulze <joey>
- Neil McGovern <neilm>

Any previous delegation to the same team, not explicitly listed above,
is revoked.

The delegation is not time-limited. It will be effective

Debian Project Leader Elections 2012: Rebuttals

Kurt Roeckx - Debian Project Secretary — 2012-03-20T23:22:26

Hi,

The candidates made rebuttals and they are now available as part
of their platform at:
http://www.debian.org/vote/2012/vote_001


Kurt Roeckx
Debian Project Secretary

Bits from Debian Med team

Andreas Tille — 2012-03-17T10:22:55

Hi,

in this bits:
  1. Debian Med Bug Squashing Advent Calendar 2011
  2. Anniversary of Debian Med
  3. Second Debian Med sprint (Southport, 27th-29th January 2012)
  4. Mentoring of Month (MoM)
  5. DDs who came to Debian because of Debian Med
  6. Future plans
  7. General lessons learned

1. Debian Med Bug Squashing Advent Calendar 2011
------------------------------------------------

In December last year Thorsten Alteholz has started a nice QA
initiative[1a] which might be interesting for other teams next Advent.
The Debian Med team was able to fix about 70 bugs in this time.  Thanks
to Thorsten for this nice piece of motivation and thanks to everybody
who took part in the bug squashing.

 [1a] http://debian-med.alteholz.de/advent/

2. Anniversary of Debian Med
----------------------------

On Mon, 7 Jan 2002 the Debian Med project was first officially
announced.  I submitted a short blog posting[2b] about this and
perhaps you might like to see a long sequence of talks[2c] about
this topic.

 [2a] ht

debian.net domains: opening up the LDAP dnsZoneEntry attribute

Stefano Zacchiroli — 2012-03-17T10:23:47

Dear all,
  the *.debian.net domains [1] are a useful resource that allow Debian
Developers to set up services under a debian-ish namespace. We routinely
use it to experiment with services before transferring them to the
official Debian infrastructure (debian.org) managed by DSA.  I remind
you that documentation on how to register debian.net entries is
available at [2].

[1] http://wiki.debian.org/DebianDotNet
[2] https://db.debian.org/doc-mail.html

Up to now, the information about registered debian.net entries has been
easily accessible via LDAP only to Debian Developers. The wiki index [1]
attempts to mitigate that, but it is doomed to be incomplete and out of
date. That is unfortunate. Also, there seems to be no useful reason to
keep that list non-public.

After discussion on -devel [3,4] we --- as in: DSA and myself --- have
decided to open up the list of debian.net entries. The dnsZoneEntry LDAP
attribute, currently only queryable from debian.org machines, will be
made publicly accessible.

[3] http://