Welcome to this year's 6th issue of DPN, the newsletter for the Debian
community.
Some of the topics covered in this issue:

Debian Day 2008 around the Globe
16 August 2008 will mark the 15th birthday of the Debian project since its
first announcement
by founder Ian Murdock on comp.os.linux.development on 16 August 1993. A coordination page
for local Debian User Groups organizing and announcing birthday events is
already available at the Debian Wiki.

DPL-initiated teams survey finished
Debian Project Leader Steve McIntyre has published the
summary of
the results of his teams survey. The survey yielded 116 replies, which covered
a total of 77 teams. The overall result of the survey is that the vast majority
of the respondents are very happy working within their respective teams, and
most think that their teams are working well. Concerning negative aspects of
their team work the respondents mainly named personal lack of time, the need
for more team members, and a lack of communication between teams.

Bits from the Testing Security Team
Nico Golde sent bits from the testing security team.
He summarized the security status of the current testing branch Lenny as very good and
also added that even if it may appear to be so, the testing security team does not support the
unstable branch Sid. He also invited volunteers to join the team, especially to offer
support for Lenny's kernel packages which are currently unsupported.

New members for two core teams
Christoph Berg announced that
Wouter Verhelst and Michael Koch have been added to the New Maintainer Front Desk, while Joerg Jaspert
announced that Mark Hymers has been
added as new FTP Assistant.

Desktop environments and menu policy
Daniel Dickinson initiated a discussion
about the behavior of the three major desktop environments (KDE, GNOME and Xfce) regarding their
application menu. They, as well as other desktop environments, use .desktop files supplied by applications
to create their menu, while the Debian policy only requires .menu files to be supplied by Debian packages.
While some people judged the .menu files to be obsoleted by .desktop files,
Bernhard Link
and
others pointed out some disadvantages. In the end
Russ Allbery proposed to start by extending
the existing freedesktop.org standard for desktop files to fit Debian's needs before changing the policy.

Call for talks: DebianDay Argentinia
The organizers of this year's DebianDay, a general information event taking place during the annual
Debian Conference, are still searching for talks. This year's DebianDay
will take place on 18 August 2008 in Buenos Aires. Attendees of this year's Debian Conference,
who'll be staying in Argentina a few more days after the conference, are invited to give a talk on
Debian related topics: e.g., Debian in Latin America, Internationalization in Debian, How to help Debian,
Debian Live, Making a Debian derivative distribution, Packaging for Debian or other general Debian topics.

Ideas for improved diversions and alternatives handling
Goswin von Brederlow proposed some changes
regarding the Debian package management system's handling of diversions and alternatives.
Steve Langasek found some flaws in the initial proposal, which proposed adding new control files to
the packages. However, the general consensus seems to be that declaring diversions explicitly is superior to
the current approach of handling diversions as alternatives in the maintainer scripts of packages.

dpkg triggers and user experience
Franklin Piat voiced his concern that users might
take the recent introduction of dpkg triggers (which are a mechanism for registering required actions such as man page database updates)
as something negative. User's might just notice that something called triggers
is now additionally called after packages have already been installed, without noticing that the triggers do actually
save computing time during a package's installation. Charles Plessy argued that the problem
might be solved by changing the text displayed to the user to something more transparent.

Meike Reichle and Alexander Schmehl married
After getting to know each other three years ago
through their Debian work
Debian Developers Meike Reichle and Alexander Schmehl were
married on Saturday, 28 June 2008, at Lake Constance in Germany.
This marks the first time two Debian Developers were joined in marriage.
Several other DDs, one of whom served as the groom's best man,
were present to celebrate with Meike's and Alexander's friends and families. As a wedding gift they
presented a cookbook including the favourite recipes of many members of the
Debian community. Version1.1 of the book is already in the works, hopefully with a clarified license and maybe also incorporating
changes required by FTBFS bugs if any are filed by the newlyweds in time. The Debian project's
congratulations go out to the happy couple, and we hope this may be the start of a very joyful
time in both their lives.

Other news
The 9th issue of the miscellaneous news for developers
has been released and covers the following topics: advice on quilt usage and compatibility with new source format;
update-grub's switch to using UUIDs by default; the wxwidgets2.8 upload to
unstable; and volunteers needed to handle the updating of the release
notes.

Important Debian Security Advisories
Debian's Security Team released among others advisories for the packages
dbus,
wordpress and
pcre3.
Please read them carefully and take the proper measures.

Work-needing packages
Currently 497 packages are orphaned and 110 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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