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Moritz Muehlenhoff wrote:

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The Debian archive is the biggest of all distributions and although
there's security support for all security issues being found, there's
still room for improvement and a need for increased resilience against
flaws not yet discovered.

A group of people have been working on introducing advanced security
hardening features into our archive:
http://alioth.debian.org/projects/hardening/

We recommend to activate the following features in individual packages
for now and discuss how to enable them system-wide later. (Matthias
Klose proposed a mechanism in debian-devel, which could be used for
it: http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2007/12/msg00090.html).

Some maintainers have already pro-actively enabled these features,
e.g. in the sendmail and openssh packages, but we're heading for
full archive coverage now.

There are two general classes of enhancements we'd like to apply to
Debian:

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preparing sid/lenny to build with GCC-4.3 (0-day NMUs)
======================================================

Over the last year many test rebuilds of the archive were made using
new compiler versions taken from the upstream repositories. The
results of these rebuilds look promising so we will make GCC-4.3 the
default compiler for at least these architectures with good test
results soon after the creation of the GCC-4.3 release branch. Other
distributions (Fedora and Novell) are currently preparing their next
releases based on the GCC-4.3 compilers, and are heavily involved in
upstream development. Test rebuilds for Ubuntu gutsy and hardy were
made for amd64, i386, and sparc. On Debian one or more test rebuilds
were made for alpha, hppa, i386, ia64, amd64, sparc. In short, 4.3
will become a good release.

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For a few years now, I have worked on a replacement for the trusty old
way of organising the Debian boot. Did you ever make a package with an
init.d script, and wonder which sequence number to pick for your
script? I am talking about the numbers in the file names in
/etc/rc[S0-6].d/. Or are you one of the lucky ones that could just ask
for the defaults, and ignore the problem? Picking a good sequence
number is very hard some times, for example when you want to run after
program Z started at sequence number 20 and before program X also
started sequence number 20.

This problem lead to the Linux Software Base (LSB) specification for
init.d script dependencies, and the system I have worked on is a
replacement to make it possible for us to let the sequence numbers be
calculated automatically, based on the declared dependencies in each
individual script.

(this Frenglish-written report was originally meant to be shared by
Sam Hocevar and myself which may explain the third person
language. Sam hadn't enough free time to review and amend it, so
please take it more as a personal report by myself, while still
talking about our shared experience. All errors and omissions
are mine, don't blame Sam for them)

About FOSS.in
-------------

FOSS.in is the major FLOSS-elated event in India. It is entirely run
by volunteers and, in that matter, probably one of the largest
volunteer-run FLOSS conferences all over the world, with about 2600
attendees this year.

The conference took place from Dec. 4th to 8th in the Indian Institute
of Science, Bangalore, the IT capital city of India, in the state of
Karnataka, in the central southern part of India.

This year, the conference was focused on contributing and ways to
bring more contributors to FLOSS, particularly in India.

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Hi everybody,

From December 12th to December 15th, Junta de Extremadura
hosted another one of the Debian Meetings; five i18n guys shared
ideas, food, buses and fun with the Debian KDE Maintainers. We
would like to thank Extremadura for hosting us during the Hispalinux
Meeting 2007, the event was held at Universad de Derecho (Law
University) in Caceres, Spain.

These are the minutes, results and notes from our work, it
is a brief description but hopefully complete of what we have done
and what is still missing/pending.

Thanks to Cesar (cek) we had the chance to work on churro
(i18n.debian.net) locally; the server is still running a 2.4 kernel
because of some "tick" problems with 2.6 series, the last one tried
was 2.6.21 and we should try newer ones, in order to support upgrades
and not get stuck with 2.4, we hope Cesar will find time to test new
Debian kernels.

Hi folks,

In December of 2007, members of the Qt/KDE team gathered in Cáceres, Spain for
a meeting sponsored by the Government of Extremadura.

In the following weeks, we have been working towards the goals set at that
meeting, some of which have since been slightly altered.

Plans for KDE 3
==================

We will release Lenny with KDE 3.

The current KDE version in unstable is 3.5.8, which will shortly migrate to
testing. 3.5.9 does not yet have a release date, but it will be decided soon.
Therefore, Lenny will most likely be released with a version of 3.5.9 that
includes patches for the most important fixes from the upstream KDE 4 branch.
Additionally, the kdepim-enterprise branch is being merged with the current
kdepim, which will bring some features and bugfixes, most importantly to KMail.
Otherwise, the only major changes to our current KDE 3 packaging are some
re-working of the meta-packages and the removal of meta-kde-extras.
More info about this can be found on our webpage. [0][1]