New Debian Developers and Maintainers (March and April 2016)
On Tue 17 May 2016 with tags projectWritten by Ana Guerrero Lopez
Translations: ca es fr
The following contributors got their Debian Developer accounts in the last two months:
- Sven Bartscher (kritzefitz)
- Harlan Lieberman-Berg (hlieberman)
Congratulations!
What does it mean that ZFS is included in Debian?
On Sun 15 May 2016 with tags zfs contribWritten by Ana Guerrero Lopez
Petter Reinholdtsen recently blogged about ZFS availability in Debian. Many people have worked hard on getting ZFS support available in Debian and we would like to thank everyone involved in getting to this point and explain what ZFS in Debian means.
The landing of ZFS in the Debian archive was blocked for years due to licensing problems. Finally, the inclusion of ZFS was announced slightly more than a year ago, on April 2015 by the DPL at the time, Lucas Nussbaum who wrote "We received legal advice from Software Freedom Law Center about the inclusion of libdvdcss and ZFS in Debian, which should unblock the situation in both cases and enable us to ship them in Debian soon.". In January this year, the following DPL, Neil McGovern blogged with a lot of more details about the legal situation behind this and summarized it as "TLDR: It’s going in contrib, as a source only dkms module."
ZFS is not available exactly in Debian, since Debian is only what's included in the "main" section archive. What people really meant here is that ZFS code is now in included in "contrib" and it's available for users using DKMS.
Many people also mixed this with Ubuntu now including ZFS. However, Debian and Ubuntu are not doing the same, Ubuntu is shipping directly pre-built kernel modules, something that is considered to be a GPL violation. As the Software Freedom Conservancy wrote "while licensed under an acceptable license for Debian's Free Software Guidelines, also has a default use that can cause licensing problems for downstream Debian users".
Debian welcomes its 2016 summer interns
On Sun 24 April 2016 with tags gsoc outreachy google announce development diversity software code projectsWritten by Nicolas Dandrimont
Translations: vi
We're excited to announce that Debian has selected 29 interns to work with us this summer: 4 in Outreachy, and 25 in the Google Summer of Code.
Here is the list of projects and the interns who will work on them:
Android SDK tools in Debian:
APT - dpkg communications rework:
Continuous Integration for Debian-Med packages:
Extending the Debian Developer Horizon:
Improving and extending AppRecommender:
Improving the debsources frontend:
Improving voice, video and chat communication with Free Software:
- Alok Anand
- Balram P
- Jaminy Prabaharan
- Keerthana Krishnan
- Kévin Avignon
- Mateus Bellomo
- Mesut Can Gurle
- Nicolas Reynaud
- Nik Vaessen
- Olivier Grégoire
- Pranav Jain
- Simon Désaulniers
- Udit Raikwar
MIPS and MIPSEL ports improvements:
Reproducible Builds for Debian and Free Software:
Support for KLEE in Debile:
The Google Summer of Code and Outreachy programs are possible in Debian thanks to the effort of Debian developers and contributors that dedicate part of their free time to mentor students and outreach tasks.
Join us and help extend Debian! You can follow the students weekly reports on the debian-outreach mailing-list, chat with us on our IRC channel or on each project's team mailing lists.
Congratulations to all of them!
DPL elections 2016, congratulations Mehdi Dogguy!
On Sun 17 April 2016 with tags dplWritten by Ana Guerrero Lopez
Translations: vi
The Debian Project Leader elections finished yesterday and the winner is Mehdi Dogguy! Of a total of 1023 developers, 282 developers voted using the Condorcet method.
More information about the result is available in the Debian Project Leader Elections 2016 page.
The new term for the project leader starts today April 17th and expire on April 17th 2017.
Debian announces partnership to sub-contract publicity and press to an outside marketing agency
On Fri 01 April 2016 with tags debian publicity announceWritten by Debian Publicity Team
Translations: vi
Last year we started to push more of Debian news and information away the single news source of the DPN into other media services. Debian has been more active than ever on our many IRC channels, free software based social networks, and unofficial Twitter and Facebook feeds. Today we have decided to announce the next stage in keeping Debian at the forefront of media by sub-contracting publicity and press to an outside marketing agency.
The marketing agency (name will be disclosed soon) has provided an AI system (running entirely with free software) which will be fed with all the content of Debian mailing lists and sources.debian.net to understand the character of the Debian community and then better customize future articles, interviews, and event news.
However, some bits of personal information are also needed. Please install the "publicity" package and you'll be presented a form to fill in your data: name, surname, phone, snail mail address, place of birth, names of family members, employers or employees. Each person providing their data to the agency will receive coupon for a 20% discount in the download (purchase) of next Debian release (valid only for downloads from the official site www.debian.org).
We kindly ask every Debian community member to sign up in, at least, one of theses services: Twitter, Whatsapp, Slack or Facebook (IRC, mailing lists, and free software based RTC are allegedly not so 'cool'). Users need not be concerned with losing the features that the IRC bots provide (so long KGB!) as they will be replaced by Tay-like AI systems. The most visible change will be that MeetBot will no longer log the meetings anymore, but we have bribed an NSA employee so they pass the relevant messages to us.
"If this 'centralization, outsourcing and pay-and-forget' approach goes well with publicity, I'm considering running for DPL in 2017 to extend this model to other areas of Debian" said Laura Arjona Reina, (now) former publicity delegate.
A new logo and mascot has been designed too, as a symbol of this new era embracing the standards of branding and corporate messaging. Please consider voting in favor of it, in the General Resolution that will be proposed soon:
