Welcome to this year's 12th issue of DPN, the newsletter for the Debian
community.
Some of the topics covered in this issue include:

Bits from the DPL

Steve McIntyre sent out another Bits
from the DPL mail. His first topic was the recently
finished eighth Debian Conference in Argentina. Even though many developers
and contributors could not travel there he considered it to be a successful
conference. He especially thanked the video team, who did an amazing job this
year making most of the sessions available via stream as well as forwarding
questions via Internet Relay Chat. Steve is already looking forward to
next year's Debian Conference, which will take place in the Junta Extremadura
in Spain.

What you can do for Lenny

Unfortunatly, Debian GNU/Linux 5.0 Lenny hasn't been released yet.
Alexander Reichle-Schmehl briefly explained
the problems and listed some open issues which need to resolved
before Lenny can be released. He points out that even a simple user
(meaning everyone) can help.

500,000th bug reported

Christian Perrier
noted
that the 500,000th bug has been
reported to Debian's bug tracking sytem. In it, Nobuhiro Iwamatsu requested a feature
for the common debian build system, a tool used to create Debian packages, and
even provided a patch.

Valid-Until field in Release files

While the current archive structure prevents injection of malicious packages
through a digital trust path (e.g. at a bad mirror), it still has a small
flaw. A potential attacker could use outdated release information to force
people to use an outdated mirror, leaving out the latest security updates. To
address this problem, Jörg Jaspert has added
a valid until field to the release information. APT (or another
package manager) can then check if the data available on the mirror is up to
date. Work has already begun to integrate this feature into the apt package
manager and tools based upon it; however,
some questions remain unresolved.

Choosing a language during NAS installations

Martin Michlmayr reported that
due to changes of the internal structure of the debian-installer, it is now
it is now possible to choose the language (and the resulting
system) for installations on NAS machines. Installations on headless NAS devices
are typically done remotely via SSH and up until now, the network had been started
after the language had already been chosen, thus the ability to choose a language
interactively was completely disabled for such devices. Due to changes in the
component responsible for choosing the locale, this feature can now be enabled
for these kinds of devices.

m68k moved to debian-ports

After missing release criteria for both Etch and Lenny, the m68k port made the
switch from using the wanna-build instance on Debian infrastructure to the one
on Debian-Ports. This is a necessary
step before m68k can be removed from the Debian archive. Buildd.Net still supports
the m68k architecture and has already adopted the change. The m68k port was
one of two official ports in the first Debian release, Debian 2.0 (the other
being i386).

Other news

Christian Perrier released
the final number of languages which will be supported in the debian-installer
of the upcoming release. All-in-all 63 languages will be supported, which is 5
more than in the current release.

Linux Kongress 2008

From Thursday the 9th of October to Friday the 10th of October, the Debian
Project will participate with a booth at the Linux-Kongress 2008 in Hamburg,
Germany. Please see the respective
events page for
further details.

Technical Dutch Open Source Event 2008

From Saturday the 25th of October to Sunday the 26th of October, the Debian
Project will participate with a booth at the Technical Dutch Open Source Event
(T-DOSE) in Eindhoven, Netherlands. Please see the respective
events page for
further details.

New Developers

6 applicants have
been accepted
as Debian Developers since the prior issue of the Debian Project News. Please
welcome Tobias Grimm, Chris Lamb, Manuel Prinz, Patrick Schoenfeld, Sandro
Tosi, Jan Wagner and Barry deFreese in our project!

Important Debian Security Advisories

Debian's Security Team recently released advisories for these packages (among others):
openssh,
twiki,
phpmyadmin,
horde3,
mplayer,
lighttpd,
squid and
php5.
Please read them carefully and take the proper measures.

New and noteworthy packages

ddclient
(an utility to get access to home servers despite having a dynamic IP),
FlameRobin
(a GUI to Administer Firebird/Interbase SQL servers) and
logstalgia
(a pong-like apache log viewer) where presented by Debian Package of the Day.

Work-needing packages

Currently 444 packages are orphaned and 125 packages are up for adoption.
Please take a look at
the
recent
reports
to see if there are packages you are interested in or view the complete list of
packages which need
your help.

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