The DebConf team has had to take the hard decision that DebConf 20 cannot happen in-person, in Haifa, in August, as originally planned. This decision is based on the status of the venue in Haifa, the local team's view of the local health situation, the existing travel restrictions and the results of a survey of potential participants.

DebConf 20 will be held online instead!

The Debian community can still get together to share ideas, discuss plans in Birds of a Feather sessions, and eat cheese, from the safety of the desks at home.

So, please submit your talk, sprint, and BoF proposals for DebConf 20 Online.

It will be held within the same dates, as before, 23-29 August. The DebConf team expects the event to be significantly shorter than a usual DebCamp + DebConf, but that will depend on the volume of proposals received.

Hopefully in 2021 we can once again hold conferences in person. DebConf 21 is scheduled to be taking place in Haifa. The following planned DebConfs will be held a year later than originally scheduled: 2022 in Kosovo and 2023 in Kochi, India.

See you online in August!

Debian comes with tons of fonts for all kinds of purposes, you can easily list them all (almost) with: apt-cache search ^fonts-

Above you can see a nice composition with examples of several fonts. The composition is published under the MIT (Expat) license and the source SVG (created with Inkscape) can be downloaded here. You will need the fonts to be installed in your system so the SVG is correctly rendered.

If you want to learn more you can have a look at the wiki page about fonts (https://wiki.debian.org/Fonts), and if you want to contribute or maintain fonts in Debian, don't hesitate to join the Fonts Team!

The following contributors got their Debian Developer accounts in the last two months:

• Paride Legovini (paride)
• Ana Custura (acute)
• Felix Lechner (lechner)

The following contributors were added as Debian Maintainers in the last two months:

• Sven Geuer
• Håvard Flaget Aasen

Congratulations!

We are happy to announce that registration for DebConf20 is now open. The event will take place from August 23rd to 29th, 2020 at the University of Haifa, in Israel, and will be preceded by DebCamp, from August 16th to 22nd.

Although the Covid-19 situation is still rather fluid, as of now, Israel seems to be on top of the situation. Days with less than 10 new diagnosed infections are becoming common and businesses and schools are slowly reopening. As such, we are hoping that, at least as far as regulations go, we will be able to hold an in-person conference. There is more (and up to date) information at the conference's FAQ. Which means, barring a second wave, that there is reason to hope that the conference can go forward.

For that, we need your help. We need to know, assuming health regulations permit it, how many people intend to attend. This year probably more than ever before, prompt registration is very important to us. If after months of staying at home you feel that rubbing elbows with fellow Debian Developers is precisely the remedy that will salvage 2020, then we ask that you do register as soon as possible.

Sadly, things are still not clear enough for us to make a final commitment to holding an in-person conference, but knowing how many people intend to attend will be a great help in making that decision. The deadline for deciding on postponing, cancelling or changing the format of the conference is June 8th.

To register for DebConf20, please visit our website and log into the registration system and fill out the form. You can always edit or cancel your registration, but please note that the last day to confirm or cancel is July 26th, 2020 23:59:59 UTC. We cannot guarantee availability of accommodation, food and swag for unconfirmed registrations.

We do suggest that attendees begin making travel arrangements as soon as possible, of course. Please bear in mind that most air carriers allow free cancellations and changes.

Any questions about registrations should be addressed to registration@debconf.org.

Bursary for travel, accomodation and meals

In an effort to widen the diversity of DebConf attendees, the Debian Project allocates a part of the financial resources obtained through sponsorships to pay for bursaries (travel, accommodation, and/or meals) for participants who request this support when they register.

As resources are limited, we will examine the requests and decide who will receive the bursaries. They will be destined:

• Debian funded bursaries are available to active Debian contributors.
• Debian diversity bursaries are available to newcomers to Debian/DebConf. Especially from under-represented communities.

Giving a talk, organizing an event or helping during DebConf20 is taken into account when deciding upon your bursary, so please mention them in your bursary application.

For more information about bursaries, please visit Applying for a Bursary to DebConf

Attention: deadline to apply for bursaries using the registration form before May 31st, 2019 23:59:59 UTC. This deadline is necessary in order to the organisers to have some time to analyze the requests.

To register for the Conference, either with or without a bursary request, please visit: https://debconf20.debconf.org/register

Participation to DebConf20 is conditional to your respect of our Code of Conduct. We require you to read, understand and abide by this code.

DebConf would not be possible without the generous support of all our sponsors, especially our Platinum Sponsor Lenovo and Gold Sponsors deepin and Matanel Foundation. DebConf20 is still accepting sponsors; if you are interested, or think you know of others who would be willing to help, please get in touch!

We are very excited to announce that Debian has selected nine interns to work under mentorship on a variety of projects with us during the Google Summer of Code.

Here are the list of the projects, students, and details of the tasks to be performed.

Project: Android SDK Tools in Debian

• Student(s): Manas Kashyap, Raman Sarda, and Samyak-jn

Deliverables of the project: Make the entire Android toolchain, Android Target Platform Framework, and SDK tools available in the Debian archives.

Project: Packaging and Quality assurance of COVID-19 relevant applications

• Student: Nilesh

Deliverables of the project: Quality assurance including bug fixing, continuous integration tests and documentation for all Debian Med applications that are known to be helpful to fight COVID-19

Project: BLAS/LAPACK Ecosystem Enhancement

• Student: Mo Zhou

Deliverables of the project: Better environment, documentation, policy, and lintian checks for BLAS/LAPACK.

Project: Quality Assurance and Continuous integration for applications in life sciences and medicine

• Student: Pranav Ballaney

Deliverables of the project: Continuous integration tests for all Debian Med applications, QA review, and bug fixes.

Project: Systemd unit translator

• Student: K Gopal Krishna

Deliverables of the project: A systemd unit to OpenRC init script translator. Updated OpenRC package into Debian Unstable.

Project: Architecture Cross-Grading Support in Debian

• Student: Kevin Wu

Deliverables of the project: Evaluate, test, and develop tools to evaluate cross-grade checks for system and user configuration.

Project: Upstream/Downstream cooperation in Ruby

• Student: utkarsh2102

Deliverables of the project: Create guide for rubygems.org on good practices for upstream maintainers, develop a tool that can detect problems and, if possible fix those errors automatically. Establish good documentation, design the tool to be extensible for other languages.

Congratulations and welcome to all the interns!

The Google Summer of Code program is possible in Debian thanks to the efforts of Debian Developers and Debian Contributors that dedicate part of their free time to mentor interns and outreach tasks.

Join us and help extend Debian! You can follow the interns' weekly reports on the debian-outreach mailing-list, chat with us on our IRC channel or reach out to the individual projects' team mailing lists.