1 Happy new year, Debian!
3 To celebrate, here are some
4 [freshly posted](https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2013/01/msg00001.html),
5 bits from the DPL for December 2012.
9 Dear Project Members, happy new year!
11 Here goes another report of DPL activities, this time for December 2012. This
12 issue of the DPL-monthly is skinnier than usual: during the past month I've
13 been struck by the catastrophe also known as "family holiday season", enjoying
14 a solid 10 day break from computer-related activities.
20 - I've been invited to talk about Debian and its opportunities in the field of
21 education (for both students and teachers) at the [fOSSa conference][1] in
22 Lille, France. [Slides][2] of the talk I delivered there are available.
24 [1]: http://libreplanet.org/wiki/LibrePlanet:Conference/2013
25 [2]: http://upsilon.cc/~zack/talks/2012/20121205-fossa.pdf
27 - On related news, I've gladly accepted an invitation to talk at the next
28 [LibrePlanet conference][3] in Boston, next March. It will be the occasion to
29 discuss the status of collaboration with the FSF and the GNU
30 Project. <small>(FWIW, I'm trying to secure travel sponsorship with the
31 conference organizers, but if that won't turn out to be possible I plan to go
32 on Debian funds, as I consider this event important enough to do so.)</small>
34 [3]: http://libreplanet.org/wiki/LibrePlanet:Conference/2013
40 - The debian.eu saga is over! DNS is now under control of DSA, currently as a
41 redirection to debian.org as for many other ccTLD, and we have now paid the
42 corresponding transfer costs.
44 - The saga about the relicensing of www.d.o content, on the other hand, is
45 still ongoing. But we made progress! Bradley Kuhn has kindly offered his
46 experience to complete the relicensing part --- and most notably for dealing
47 with contributions from people we haven't been able to contact. Due to
48 busy-ness we will proceed further only in a few months, but in the meantime
49 there is some work to do on our side, as [documented in #388141][4].
51 [4]: http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=388141#356
53 - In conformance with the periodic hardware maintenance plan (the goal of which
54 is, I remind you, having all Debian hardware under warranty) we have bought
55 extended warranty for the storage array that serves project machines hosted
56 at UBC ECE (~830 CAD). Thanks goes to Luca Filipozzi for taking care of the
59 - As [they did last year][5], Amazon kindly renewed their offer of AWS credit
60 to be used for Debian related purposes, such as QA rebuilds. This year they
61 offered us 8'000 USD of credit which, according to projections from last year
62 usage, should be enough for QA rebuilds and buildd usage for events like
63 BSP. Many thanks to Lucas Nussbaum and Bill Allombert for reaching out to
64 Amazon contacts and making this possible.
66 [5]: http://www.lucas-nussbaum.net/blog/?p=718
72 - The experiment of sharing the load of DPL responsibilities within a larger
73 team still ongoing. We held one more IRC meeting in December (and skipped one
74 due to holiday season…). [Logs][6] are available at the usual place.
76 [6]: http://meetbot.debian.net/debian-dpl/2012/debian-dpl.2012-12-11-17.59.html
78 - Also, I've now started moving the DPL-related part of my own TODO list to the
79 dpl-helpers.git repository. The idea is to further reduce SPOF and ease the
80 transition to the next DPL.
82 BTW: this is my **last-3 report as DPL**. If you haven't yet started
83 encouraging project members you think could do a good job as DPL to apply,
84 you should better hurry up!
87 Collaboration with the outer world
88 ==================================
90 - I've signed the OSI affiliate membership agreement on behalf of Debian. This
91 is just a long overdue formalization of the decision to join of a few months
92 ago. The signed version is available in the DPL document archive on
93 master.d.o, and it has been publicly discussed with other projects on the OSI
94 affiliates mailing list.
96 - As requested, I've provided a quote for FSF's [restricted boot campaign][7],
97 that we have subscribed as a project a while ago.
99 [7]: http://www.fsf.org/campaigns/secure-boot-vs-restricted-boot/statement
101 - Thanks to the prod of various people (hi, Sune!), I've noticed an
102 [interesting call][8] by the Italian government to representatives of FOSS
103 communities, to form a group of experts that will have to decide the criteria
104 to adopt in the public administration. The call is in Italian, but
105 [an article in English][9] on the matter has been posted on the Joinup
106 website of the European Commission. I've therefore submitted an application
107 as Debian representative and, if accepted, I'll be happy to push for criteria
108 that too often leaves high quality and well reputed community-based
109 distributions out of the door for futile reasons (e.g. corporate
112 [8]: http://www.digitpa.gov.it/notizie/avviso-partecipazione-tavolo-lavoro-redazione-linee-guida-criteri-valutazioni-comparative-ai
113 [9]: http://joinup.ec.europa.eu/news/registration-closes-today-helping-italy-draft-open-source-criteria
116 That's all for last year, enjoy the new one, which will soon see a new Debian
117 release out of the door. And to make it happen sooner, let's go back fix RC
124 PS the day-to-day activity log for December 2012 is available at the
125 usual place `master:/srv/leader/news/bits-from-the-DPL.txt.201212`
127 [[!tag lang/english planet-debian bits debian dpl]]