Welcome to this year's 4th issue of DPN, the newsletter for the Debian
community.
Some of the topics covered in this issue:

Release Update
Marc Brockschmidt reported
about the status of the upcoming stable release. After some major transitions, like the
ocaml
transition
Lenny is in good shape, but still a lot of work needs to be done.
Since the armel architecture made great improvements the release team
decided to upgrade it to a proper release architecture.

Debian Installer for Lenny Beta-2 ready for testing
The second beta version of the Debian Installer for the upcoming
release Lenny has been released. Some new or improved features are:

Bits from the ftp-masters
Joerg Jaspert sent out bits from the ftp-masters
containing recent
activities of that team, including some personnel changes as well as a lot
of code changes regarding Debian's infrastructure improving the overall
teamwork, for example by making it easier for the release team to handle
transitions. He also asked for volunteers for new ftp assistants. Later he
reported
that he already got four volunteers as well as several other suggestions
for improvements.

Report from LinuxTag 2008
Bastian Venthur and
Noel Koethe
reported about this year's Debian booth at the LinuxTag 2008, a major conference
about free software in Europe. Marko Jung, one of the organisers,
added thanks
for the good job the booth staff did. He also notes, that there was a high demand
from the visitors' side for a Debian sub-conference at next year's LinuxTag.

Handling of removed packages
Marc Brockschmidt wondered about the proper way to
handle packages removed between two releases.
One of his major concerns are packages becoming unsupported without users
noticing it. Several people replied, that package management tools are
already trying to notify users, while
Frans Pop pointed out, that the
release notes
have a chapter handling this issue.

French debconf translations completed
Christian Perrier reported
that the french translation team finished translating all templates for the debconf system,
helping users to configure packages on installation time. He notes, that some of these packages
still need to add the translated templates. German, Czech and Portuguese are also quite close to
the 100% mark.

Call for help by the German translation team
The German translation team sent a
call for help
for the translation of package descriptions. The upcoming stable release will support
showing users translated descriptions of available packages, but currently only 2100 of
the more than 18000 package descriptions are translated to German. The statistics
for other languages are similar. Information on how to help the ongoing translation
effort is available at
our website.

Other News
The 8th issue of the miscellaneous news for developers
has been released and covers the following
topics: Minor update to the mailing list code of conduct, Document aimed at
upstreams in preparation, d-i beta2 in preparation (breaks beta 1), New
transition check tool.

Important Debian Security Advisories
Debian's Security Team released among others advisories for the packages Samba,
Linux
2.6.18
and tomcat 5.5.
Please look at them and take the proper measures.

Work-needing packages
Currently 450 packages are orphaned and 107 packages are up for adoption. Please take a look
at the recent
reports if there are packages
you are interested in or view the complete archive of packages requesting
help.

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