Welcome to this year's 5th issue of DPN, the newsletter for the Debian
community.
Some of the topics covered in this issue:

Call for new New Maintainer Application Managers
Marc Brockschmidt, member of the New Maintainer Frontdesk,
sent
a call for Application Managers taking care of New Maintainers. Application
Managers should have a broad experience in sponsoring and mentoring of
prospective developers, a firm knowledge of the Debian Policy and Developer's
Reference and at least a rough understanding of the current New Maintainer
process.

Backports.org keyring package?
Robert Milan stated his
intention to package the keyring of
the unofficial Backports.org service.
This would ease the usage of this service, since the current approach to
establish a trust path for the package management system is quite complicated,
especially for inexperienced users. Concerns were raised because
Backports.org is an unofficial service. Robert argued in favour of the
inclusion, since it is often recommended to users to use the Backport service
when they are in need of newer packages.

How to write proper get-orig-source targets
David Paleino
wondered
how to deal with the get-orig-source target for debian/rules files. According
to policy, this target should create the latest upstream tarball, which might
mean to export a version from a version control system. During this process
timestamps of files are included, causing different checksums, even if the
files haven't changed. Calling gzip with the -n switch didn't solve the
problem entirely, but
pristine-tar seems to be the
solution to the problem.

Usefulness of Debian Release Goals?
Peter Eisentraut
wondered
about the so called Release Goals (global goals which should be
implemented with the next release, but won't block a release if not completed).
While they are good to improve the overall quality of the packages, most won't
be noticed by users and most should rather become part of the policy. He also
added that searching for bugs concerning release goals isn't very easy and
proposed to set up an SQL database. Marc Brockschmidt added that such a
database is part of a project in Google's Summer of Code.

Removing lilo?
William Pitcock
asked for
opinions about the removal of the boot loader lilo. Since lilo has a
grave bug that is not trivial to fix
and grub is pretty stable, he wondered if lilo is still needed at all. Frans Pop,
member of the team developing the Debian installation system,
disagreed.
They would regularly receive installation reports having lilo installed.
Since it needs several steps from the default installation routine to install
lilo, he concludes that there's still demand for lilo packages.

Report of the BSP in Utrecht
On the weekend of 14-15 June a Bug Squashing party was held in Utrecht.
Thijs Kinkhorst
summarised
the results, which included testing of the Debian-Installer on various
platforms, resolving various release critical bugs and moving
forums.debian.net to an official Debian
server, improving reliability and responsiveness of this popular service.

Debian powers Max Planck Institute 32.8 TFlops supercomputer
The Observational Relativity and Cosmology Research Group at the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics
in Hannover has created Germany's 4th largest
supercomputer using Debian GNU/Linux. By using Debian GNU/Linux on its
clusters, the Research Group reduced the
amount of work needed on the hardware and software infrastructure, compared to
other scientific clusters running on other distributions, allowing them to
focus on their objective of detecting gravitational waves. Dr. Aulbert,
one of the cluster designers said: Thomas Lange's
FAI package is extremely
useful for automatic deployment of Debian. For
example, without much tweaking and using only two hosts, we were able to
reinstall the cluster in about 2.5 hours and were only limited by those two
servers' network connection.

Other News
Brice Goglin sent a
report from the X strike
force concerning the upcoming stable release. Since Xorg 7.4 and Xserver 1.5
which were scheduled for this year's February are late, they won't make it into
the upcoming stable release, which will be shipped with Xorg 7.3 and Xserver
1.4.2.

Important Debian Security Advisories
Debian's Security Team released among others advisories for the packages
xorg-server and
typo3. Please
read them carefully and take the proper measures.

Work-needing packages
Currently 453 packages are orphaned and 111 packages are up for adoption.
Please take a look at the recent
report if there are packages
you are interested in or view the complete archive of packages requesting
help.

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