The following contributors got their Debian Developer accounts in the last two months:
The following contributors were added as Debian Maintainers in the last two months:
Congratulations!
This is a final reminder: if you intend to apply for a DebConf17 bursary and have not yet done so, please proceed as soon as possible.
Bursary applications for DebConf17 will be accepted until May 10th at 23:59 UTC. Applications submitted after this deadline will not be considered.
You can apply for a bursary when you register for the conference.
Remember that giving a talk is considered towards your bursary; if you have a submission to make, submit it even if it is only sketched-out. You will be able to detail it later.
Please make sure to double-check your accommodation choices (dates and venue). Details about accommodation arrangements can be found on the wiki.
Note: For DebCamp we only have on-site accommodation available. The option chosen in the registration system will only be for the DebConf period (August 5 to 12).
See you in Montréal!
The DebConf team would like to call for proposals for the DebConf17 Open Day, a whole day dedicated to sessions about Debian and Free Software, and aimed at the general public. Open Day will preceed DebConf17 and will be held in Montreal, Canada, on August 5th 2017.
DebConf Open Day will be a great opportunity for users, developers and people simply curious about our work to meet and learn about the Debian Project, Free Software in general and related topics.
Submit your proposalWe welcome submissions of workshops, presentations or any other activity which involves Debian and Free Software. Activities in both English and French are accepted.
Here are some ideas about content we'd love to offer during Open Day. This list is not exhaustive, feel free to propose other ideas!
To submit your proposal, please fill the form at https://debconf17.debconf.org/talks/new/
VolunteerWe need volunteers to help ensure Open Day is a success! We are specifically looking for people familiar with the Debian installer to attend the Debian installfest, as resources for people seeking help to install Debian on their devices. If you're interested, please add your name to our wiki: https://wiki.debconf.org/wiki/DebConf17/OpenDay#Installfest
AttendParticipation to Open Day is free and no registration is required.
The schedule for Open Day will be announced in June 2017.
The Debian Project Leader elections finished yesterday and the winner is Chris Lamb!
Of a total of 1062 developers, 322 developers voted using the Condorcet method.
More information about the result is available in the Debian Project Leader Elections 2017 page.
The current Debian Project Leader, Mehdi Dogguy, congratulated Chris Lamb in his Final bits from the (outgoing) DPL message. Thanks, Mehdi, for the service as DPL during this last twelve months!
The new term for the project leader starts on April 17th and expires on April 16th 2018.
This post was an April Fools' Day joke.
The space agencies running the International Space Station (ISS) reported that a laptop accidentally threw to space as waste in 2013 from the International State Station may have connected with a parallel Universe. This laptop was running Debian 6 and the ISS engineers managed to track its travel through the outer space. In early January, the laptop signal was lost but recovered back two weeks later in the same place. ISS engineers suspect that the laptop may had met and crossed a wormhole arriving a parallel Universe from where "somebody" sent it back later.
Eventually the laptop was recovered and in an first analysis the ISS engineers found that the laptop have a dual boot: a partition running the Debian installation made by them and a second partition running what seems to be a Debian fork or derivative totally unknown until now.
The engineers have been in contact with the Debian Project in the last weeks and a Debian group formed with delegates from different Debian teams have begun to study this new Debian derivative system. From the early results of this research, we can proudly say that somebody (or a group of beings) in a parallel universe understand Earth computers, and Debian, enough to:
The work towards knowing better this new Universe and find a way to communicate with them has just began; all the Debian users and contributors are invited to join the effort to study the operating system found. We want to prepare our Community and our Universe to live and work peacefully and respectfully with the parallel Universe communities, in the true spirit of Free Software.
In the following weeks a General Resolution will be proposed for updating our motto to "the multiversal operating system".
It's that time of year again for the Debian Project: the elections of its Project Leader!
The Project Leader position is described in the Debian Constitution.
Two Debian Developers run this year to become Project Leader: Mehdi Dogguy, who has held the office for the last year, and Chris Lamb.
We are in the middle of the campaigning period that will last until the end of April 1st. The candidates and Debian contributors are already engaging in debates and discussions on the debian-vote mailing list.
The voting period starts on April 2nd, and during the following two weeks, Debian Developers can vote to choose the person that will fit that role for one year.
The results will be published on April 16th with the term for new the project leader starting the following day.
DebConf17 will take place in Montreal, Canada in August 2017. We are working hard to provide fuel for hearts and minds, to make this conference once again a fertile soil for the Debian Project flourishing. Please join us and support this landmark in the Free Software calendar.
Eighteen companies have already committed to sponsor DebConf17! With a warm welcome, we'd like to introduce them to you.
Our first Platinum sponsor is Savoir-faire Linux, a Montreal-based Free/Open-Source Software company which offers Linux and Free Software integration solutions and actively contributes to many free software projects. "We believe that it's an essential piece [Debian], in a social and political way, to the freedom of users using modern technological systems", said Cyrille Béraud, president of Savoir-faire Linux.
Our first Gold sponsor is Valve, a company developing games, social entertainment platform, and game engine technologies. And our second Gold sponsor is Collabora, which offers a comprehensive range of services to help its clients to navigate the ever-evolving world of Open Source.
As Silver sponsors we have credativ (a service-oriented company focusing on open-source software and also a Debian development partner), Mojatatu Networks (a Canadian company developing Software Defined Networking (SDN) solutions), the Bern University of Applied Sciences (with over 6,600 students enrolled, located in the Swiss capital), Microsoft (an American multinational technology company), Evolix (an IT managed services and support company located in Montreal), Ubuntu (the OS supported by Canonical) and Roche (a major international pharmaceutical provider and research company dedicated to personalized healthcare).
ISG.EE, IBM, Bluemosh, Univention and Skroutz are our Bronze sponsors so far.
And finally, The Linux foundation, Réseau Koumbit and adte.ca are our supporter sponsors.
Become a sponsor too!Would you like to become a sponsor? Do you know of or work in a company or organization that may consider sponsorship?
Please have a look at our sponsorship brochure (or a summarized flyer), in which we outline all the details and describe the sponsor benefits.
For further details, feel free to contact us through sponsors@debconf.org, and visit the DebConf17 website at https://debconf17.debconf.org.
In Debian stretch, the upcoming new release, it is now possible to build Android apps using only packages from Debian. This will provide all of the tools needed to build an Android app targeting the "platform" android-23 using the SDK build-tools 24.0.0. Those two are the only versions of "platform" and "build-tools" currently in Debian, but it is possible to use the Google binaries by installing them into /usr/lib/android-sdk.
This doesn't cover yet all of the libraries that are used in the app, like the Android Support libraries, or all of the other myriad libraries that are usually fetched from jCenter or Maven Central. One big question for us is whether and how libraries should be included in Debian. All the Java libraries in Debian can be used in an Android app, but including something like Android Support in Debian would be strange since they are only useful in an Android app, never for a Debian app.
Building apps with these packagesHere are the steps for building Android apps using Debian's Android SDK on Stretch.
The Gradle Android Plugin is also packaged. Using the Debian package instead of the one from online Maven repositories requires a little configuration before running gradle. In the buildscript block:
Currently there is only the target platform of API Level 23 packaged, so only apps targeted at android-23 can be built with only Debian packages. There are plans to add more API platform packages via backports. Only build-tools 24.0.0 is available, so in order to use the SDK, build scripts need to be modified. Beware that the Lint in this version of Gradle Android Plugin is still problematic, so running the :lint tasks might not work. They can be turned off with lintOptions.abortOnError in build.gradle. Google binaries can be combined with the Debian packages, for example to use a different version of the platform or build-tools.
Why include the Android SDK in Debian?While Android developers could develop and ship apps right now using these Debian packages, this is not very flexible since only build-tools-24.0.0 and android-23 platform are available. Currently, the Debian Android Tools Team is not aiming to cover the most common use cases. Those are pretty well covered by Google's binaries (except for the proprietary license on the Google binaries), and are probably the most work for the Android Tools Team to cover. The current focus is on use cases that are poorly covered by the Google binaries, for example, like where only specific parts of the whole SDK are used. Here are some examples:
In the long run, the Android Tools Team aims to cover more use cases well, and also building the Android NDK. This all will happen more quickly if there are more contributors on the Android Tools team! Android is the most popular mobile OS, and can be 100% free software like Debian. Debian and its derivatives are one of the most popular platforms for Android development. This is an important combination that should grow only more integrated.
Last but not least, the Android Tools Team wants feedback on how this should all work, for example, ideas for how to nicely integrate Debian's Java libraries into the Android gradle workflow. And ideally, the Android Support libraries would also be reproducibly built and packaged somewhere that enforces only free software. Come find us on IRC and/or email! https://wiki.debian.org/AndroidTools#Communication_Channels
The following contributors got their Debian Developer accounts in the last two months:
The following contributors were added as Debian Maintainers in the last two months:
Congratulations!
The DebConf Content team would like to Call for Proposals for the DebConf17 conference, to be held in Montreal, Canada, from August 6 through August 12, 2017.
You can find this Call for Proposals in its latest form at: https://debconf17.debconf.org/cfp
Please refer to this URL for updates on the present information.
Submitting an EventSubmit an event proposal and describe your plan. Please note, events are not limited to traditional presentations or informal sessions (BoFs). We welcome submissions of tutorials, performances, art installations, debates, or any other format of event that you think would be beneficial to the Debian community.
Please include a short title, suitable for a compact schedule, and an engaging description of the event. You should use the field "Notes" to provide us information such as additional speakers, scheduling restrictions, or any special requirements we should consider for your event.
Regular sessions may either be 20 or 45 minutes long (including time for questions), other kinds of sessions (like workshops) could have different durations. Please choose the most suitable duration for your event and explain any special requests.
You will need to create an account on the site, to submit a talk. We'd encourage Debian account holders (e.g. DDs) to use Debian SSO when creating an account. But this isn't required for everybody, you can sign up with an e-mail address and password.
TimelineThe first batch of accepted proposals will be announced in April. If you depend on having your proposal accepted in order to attend the conference, please submit it as soon as possible so that it can be considered during this first evaluation period.
All proposals must be submitted before Sunday 4 June 2017 to be evaluated for the official schedule.
Topics and TracksThough we invite proposals on any Debian or FLOSS related subject, we have some broad topics on which we encourage people to submit proposals, including:
You are welcome to either suggest more tracks, or become a coordinator for any of them; please refer to the Content Tracks wiki page for more information on that.
Code of ConductOur event is covered by a Code of Conduct designed to ensure everyone's safety and comfort. The code applies to all attendees, including speakers and the content of their presentations. For more information, please see the Code on the Web, and do not hesitate to contact us at content@debconf.org if you have any questions or are unsure about certain content you'd like to present.
Video CoverageProviding video of sessions amplifies DebConf achievements and is one of the conference goals. Unless speakers opt-out, official events will be streamed live over the Internet to promote remote participation. Recordings will be published later under the DebConf license, as well as presentation slides and papers whenever available.
DebConf would not be possible without the generous support of all our sponsors, especially our Platinum Sponsor Savoir-Faire Linux. DebConf17 is still accepting sponsors; if you are interested, or think you know of others who would be willing to help, please get in touch!
In case of any questions, or if you wanted to bounce some ideas off us first, please do not hesitate to reach out to us at content@debconf.org.
We hope to see you in Montreal!
The DebConf team
Better late than never, we'd like to welcome our three Outreachy interns for this round, lasting from the 6th of December 2016 to the 6th of March 2017.
Elizabeth Ferdman is working in the Clean Room for PGP and X.509 (PKI) Key Management.
Maria Glukhova is working in Reproducible builds for Debian and free software.
Urvika Gola is working in improving voice, video and chat communication with free software.
From the official website: Outreachy helps people from groups underrepresented in free and open source software get involved. We provide a supportive community for beginning to contribute any time throughout the year and offer focused internship opportunities twice a year with a number of free software organizations.
The Outreachy program is 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, and the help of the Software Freedom Conservancy, who provides administrative support for Outreachy, as well as the continued support of Debian's donors, who provide funding for the internships.
Debian will also participate in the next round for Outreachy, during the summer of 2017. More details will follow in the next weeks.
Join us and help extend Debian! You can follow the work of the Outreachy interns reading their blogs (they are syndicated in Planet Debian), and chat with us in the #debian-outreach IRC channel and mailing list.
Congratulations, Elizabeth, Maria and Urvika!
We are very pleased to announce that Savoir-faire Linux has committed to support DebConf17 as a Platinum sponsor.
"Debian acts as a model for both Free Software and developer communities. Savoir-faire Linux promotes both vision and values of Debian. Indeed, we believe that it's an essential piece, in a social and political way, to the freedom of users using modern technological systems", said Cyrille Béraud, president of Savoir-faire Linux.
Savoir-faire Linux is a Montreal-based Free/Open-Source Software company with offices in Quebec City, Toronto, Paris and Lyon. It offers Linux and Free Software integration solutions in order to provide performance, flexibility and independence for its clients. The company actively contributes to many free software projects, and provides mirrors of Debian, Ubuntu, Linux and others.
Savoir-faire Linux was present at DebConf16 program with a talk about Ring, its GPL secure and distributed communication system. Ring package was accepted in Debian testing during DebCamp in 2016 and will be part of Debian Stretch. OpenDHT, the distributed hash table implementation used by Ring, also appeared in Debian experimental during last DebConf.
With this commitment as Platinum Sponsor, Savoir-faire Linux contributes to make possible our annual conference, and directly supports the progress of Debian and Free Software helping to strengthen the community that continues to collaborate on Debian projects throughout the rest of the year.
Thank you very much Savoir-faire Linux, for your support of DebConf17!
Become a sponsor too!DebConf17 is still accepting sponsors. Interested companies and organizations may contact the DebConf team through sponsors@debconf.org, and visit the DebConf17 website at http://debconf17.debconf.org.
On February 4th and 5th, Debian will be attending FOSDEM 2017 in Brussels, Belgium; a yearly gratis event (no registration needed) run by volunteers from the Open Source and Free Software community. It's free, and it's big: more than 600 speakers, over 600 events, in 29 rooms.
This year more than 45 current or past Debian contributors will speak at FOSDEM: Alexandre Viau, Bradley M. Kuhn, Daniel Pocock, Guus Sliepen, Johan Van de Wauw, John Sullivan, Josh Triplett, Julien Danjou, Keith Packard, Martin Pitt, Peter Van Eynde, Richard Hartmann, Sebastian Dröge, Stefano Zacchiroli and Wouter Verhelst, among others.
Similar to previous years, the event will be hosted at Université libre de Bruxelles. Debian contributors and enthusiasts will be taking shifts at the Debian stand with gadgets, T-Shirts and swag. You can find us at stand number 4 in building K, 1 B; CoreOS Linux and PostgreSQL will be our neighbours. See https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEvents/be/2017/FOSDEM for more details.
We are looking forward to meeting you all!
The following contributors got their Debian Developer accounts in the last two months:
The following contributors were added as Debian Maintainers in the last two months:
Congratulations!
FPGA (Field Programmable Gate Array) are increasingly popular for data acquisition, device control and application acceleration. Debian now features a completely Free set of tools to program FPGA in Verilog, prepare the binary and have it executed on an affordable device.
See http://wiki.debian.org/FPGA/Lattice for details. Readers familiar with the technology may rightly guess that this refers to the yosys package together with berkeley-abc, arachne-"Place-and-Route" and the icestorm tools to communicate with the device.
The packages have been contributed by the Debian Science team.
We hope this effort to support the FPGA community to collect an increasing number of skills to further smoothen the Open Source experience and lower the entry barriers for this tantalising technology.
The Debian Contributor Survey launched last week!
In order to better understand and document who contributes to Debian, we (Mathieu ONeil, Molly de Blanc, and Stefano Zacchiroli) have created this survey to capture the current state of participation in the Debian Project through the lense of common demographics. We hope a general survey will become an annual effort, and that each year there will also be a focus on a specific aspect of the project or community. The 2016 edition contains sections concerning work, employment, and labour issues in order to learn about who is getting paid to work on and with Debian, and how those relationships affect contributions.
We want to hear from as many Debian contributors as possible—whether you've submitted a bug report, attended a DebConf, reviewed translations, maintain packages, participated in Debian teams, or are a Debian Developer. Completing the survey should take 10-30 minutes, depending on your current involvement with the project and employment status.
In an effort to reflect our own ideals as well as those of the Debian project, we are using LimeSurvey, an entirely free software survey tool, in an instance of it hosted by the LimeSurvey developers.
Survey responses are anonymous, IP and HTTP information are not logged, and all questions are optional. As it is still likely possible to determine who a respondent is based on their answers, results will only be distributed in aggregate form, in a way that does not allow deanonymization. The results of the survey will be analyzed as part of ongoing research work by the organizers. A report discussing the results will be published under a DFSG-free license and distributed to the Debian community as soon as it's ready. The raw, disaggregated answers will not be distributed and will be kept under the responsibility of the organizers.
We hope you will fill out the Debian Contributor Survey. The deadline for participation is: 4 December 2016, at 23:59 UTC.
If you have any questions, don't hesitate to contact us via email at:
The following contributors got their Debian Developer accounts in the last two months:
The following contributors were added as Debian Maintainers in the last two months:
Congratulations!
The theme "softWaves" by Juliette Taka Belin has been selected as default theme for Debian 9 'stretch'.
After the Debian Desktop Team made the call for proposing themes, a total of twelve choices have been submitted, and any Debian contributor has received the opportunity to vote on them in a survey. We received 3,479 responses ranking the different choices, and softWaves has been the winner among them.
We'd like to thank all the designers that have participated providing nice wallpapers and artwork for Debian 9, and encourage everybody interested in this area of Debian, to join the Design Team. It is being considered to package all of them so they are easily available in Debian. If you want to help in this effort, or package any other artwork (for example, particularly designed to be accessibility-friendly), please contact the Debian Desktop Team, but hurry up, because the freeze for new packages in the next release of Debian starts on January 5th, 2017.
This is the second time that Debian ships a theme by Juliette Belin, who also created the theme "Lines" that enhances our actual stable release, Debian 8. Congratulations, Juliette, and thank you very much for your continued commitment to Debian!
Following the success of the last round of Outreachy, we are glad to announce that Debian will take part in the program for the next round, with internships lasting from the 6th of December 2016 to the 6th of March 2017.
From the official website: Outreachy helps people from groups underrepresented in free and open source software get involved. We provide a supportive community for beginning to contribute any time throughout the year and offer focused internship opportunities twice a year with a number of free software organizations.
Currently, internships are open internationally to women (cis and trans), trans men, and genderqueer people. Additionally, they are open to residents and nationals of the United States of any gender who are Black/African American, Hispanic/Latin@, American Indian, Alaska Native, Native Hawaiian, or Pacific Islander.
If you want to apply to an internship in Debian, you should take a look at the wiki page, and contact the mentors for the projects listed, or seek more information on the (public) debian-outreach mailing-list. You can also contact the Outreach Team directly. If you have a project idea and are willing to mentor an intern, you can submit a project idea on the Outreachy wiki page.
Here's a few words on what the interns for the last round achieved within Outreachy:
Tatiana Malygina worked on Continuous Integration for Bioinformatics applications; She has pushed more than a hundred commits to the Debian Med SVN repository over the last months, and has been sponsored for more than 20 package uploads.
Valerie Young worked on Reproducible Builds infrastructure, driving a complete overhaul of the database and software behind the tests.reproducible-builds.org website. Her blog contains regular updates throughout the program.
ceridwen worked on creating reprotest, an all-in-one tool allowing anyone to check whether a build is reproducible or not, replacing the string of ad-hoc scripts the reproducible builds team used so far. She posted regular updates on the Reproducible Builds team blog.
While Scarlett Clark did not complete the internship (as she found a full-time job by the mid-term evaluation!), she spent the four weeks she participated in the program providing patches for reproducible builds in Debian and KDE upstream.
Debian would not be able to participate in Outreachy without the help of the Software Freedom Conservancy, who provides administrative support for Outreachy, as well as the continued support of Debian's donors, who provide funding for the internships. If you want to donate, please get in touch with one of our trusted organizations.
Debian is looking forward to welcoming new interns for the next few months, come join us!
DebConf17 will take place in Montreal, Canada from August 6 to August 12, 2017. It will be preceded by DebCamp, July 31 to August 4, and Debian Day, August 5.
We invite everyone to join us in organizing DebConf17. There are different areas where your help could be very valuable, and we are always looking forward to your ideas.
The DebConf content team is open to suggestions for invited speakers. If you'd like to propose somebody who is not a regular DebConf attendee follow the details in the call for speaker proposals blog post.
We are also beginning to contact potential sponsors from all around the globe. If you know any organization that could be interested, please consider handing them the sponsorship brochure or contact the fundraising team with any leads.
The DebConf team is holding IRC meetings every two weeks. Have a look at the DebConf17 website and wiki page, and engage in the IRC channels and the mailing list.
Let’s work together, as every year, on making the best DebConf ever!