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Dear Debian contributors,

Greetings from a somewhat mild Europe! Below is a brief overview of what
I've been getting up to as your Project Leader during March 2019. For
those interested in the numbers it was a pretty busy month in the
various inboxes with over 430 "ham" mails received, 80 sent, and three
or four rather-long phone calls.

Attentive followers of the on-going Debian Project Leader Elections [0]
will have noted that I am not running for a consecutive third term.

This is therefore my last "Bits from the DPL" at least from the time
being. :) I hope it's given you some insight into what goes on behind
the curtains in this role at the very least… Good luck to all the
candidates who are standing this year — I look forward to working with
our new fearless Leader in any way I can.

Of course, work on Debian 10 'buster' remains ongoing so please do see
below on various Bug Squashing Parties (BSPs) which link to docs on how
to find and fix our (currently) 268 Release Critical (RC) bugs [1].

[ 0] https://www.debian.org/vote/2019/vote_001
[ 1] https://bugs.debian.org/release-critical/

~ § ~

* Updated the Outreach Team delegation. Thanks to Nicolas Dandrimont
(olasd), Sylvestre Ledru (sylvestre) and Tom Marble for their work
on this team over the years and a very warm welcome to both Jaminy
Prabaharan and Pranav Jain to this effort. [2]

* Briefly helped the Publicity Team [3] with the announcement
regarding the donation of $300,000 USD to Debian from the Handshake
Foundation. [4]

* Attended the Free Software Foundation's [5] annual LibrePlanet [6]
conference in Cambridge, Massachusetts where I met a huge number of
Debian folks and generally represented Debian's interests and talked
about its future plans particularly those around Debian "buster"
and Reproducible Builds [7].

* Issued four "DD certificates" [8] for Developers and Maintainers as
part of new employment, positions in academic institutions or sheer
vanity (!) etc. If you are a DD, a DM or a Debian Contributor and
you would like official certification of that you can ask the
Project Leader to generate one for you; please email leader@.

* Final arrangements for a Bug Squashing Party [9] I am helping to
organise in Gothenburg, Sweden next month as part of the
foss-north.se [10] conference. [11]

* Responded to a question regarding the criteria for entry on Debian's
"Partners" page [12]. This page highlights companies and
organisations who provide much-appreciated substantial ongoing
assistance to the Project.

* A large number of discussions with the Debian Anti-Harrassment team
[13], the Debian Account Managers [14] and myself as DPL.

* Responded to a number of responses to my previous "Bits from the
DPL" & redirected the usual requests for private support, including
queries regarding copyright/licensing, translations and the status
of the non-free archive.

[ 2] https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2019/03/msg00011.html
[ 3] https://wiki.debian.org/Teams/Publicity
[ 4] https://www.debian.org/News/2019/20190329
[ 5] https://www.fsf.org/
[ 6] https://libreplanet.org/2019/
[ 7] https://reproducible-builds.org/
[ 8] https://wiki.debian.org/DDCertificate
[ 9] https://wiki.debian.org/BSP
[10] http://foss-north.se/
[11] https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2019/01/msg00006.html
[12] https://www.debian.org/partners/
[13] https://wiki.debian.org/AntiHarassment
[14] https://wiki.debian.org/DAManager

~ § ~

As part of the preparations for "buster", we have a number of events
coming up in the upcoming month(s), including:

* April 5th → April 8th: Salzburg, Austria. [15]

* April 7th: Gothenburg, Sweden. [16]

* April 27th: Toronto, Canada. [17]

* May 25th → May 26th: Marseille, France. [18]

* June 5th → June 9th: Hamburg, Germany. [19]

Please do consider organising a Bug Squashing Party [20][21] if there
are none planned near you. To promote this, don't forget Debian is
able to reimburse 100 USD (or equivalent) to attend BSPs [22] which can encourage people to attend and contribute towards making "buster"
appear sooner.

[15] https://wiki.debian.org/BSP/2019/04/Salzburg
[16] https://wiki.debian.org/BSP/2019/04/se/Gothenburg
[17] https://wiki.debian.org/BSP/2019/04/ca/Toronto
[18] https://minidebconf-mrs.debian.net/
[19] https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEvents/de/2019/MiniDebConfHamburg
[20] https://wiki.debian.org/BSPPlanning
[21] https://wiki.debian.org/HostingBSP
[22] https://wiki.debian.org/BSP

~ § ~

In financial matters, I:

* Moved forward regarding a missing in action Trusted Organisation
[23], re-arranging various outstanding requests, etc.

* Evaluated a large number of travel/conference funding requests,
including ones for the MiniDebConf in Marseille [24], PyCon US [25],
DebUtsav Delhi [26], FOSSASIA [27], the (on-going) BSP in Paris
[28], CryptoRave in São Paulo [29], foss-north 2019 [30] and the
2018 MiniDebConf in Hamburg [31].

* Early work on arranging a potential DAM [32], AH [33] and Project
Leader meetup and re-approved/clarified various missing or
incomplete reimbursement requests.

* Further hardware-related reimbursements for some build daemons
hosted at Arm [34], a potential Raspberry Pi [35] hardware lab and
shipping costs for some previously-approved hardware keys.

[23] https://wiki.debian.org/Teams/DPL/TrustedOrganizationCriteria
[24] https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEvents/fr/2019/Marseille
[25] https://us.pycon.org/2019/
[26] https://debutsav.in/
[27] https://fossasia.org/
[28] https://wiki.debian.org/BSP/2019/03/fr/Paris
[29] https://cryptorave.org/
[30] https://foss-north.se/2019/
[31] https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEvents/de/2018/MiniDebConfHamburg
[32] https://wiki.debian.org/DAManager
[33] https://wiki.debian.org/AntiHarassment
[34] https://www.arm.com/
[35] https://www.raspberrypi.org/

~ § ~

… aaand in case you missed it:

* Registration and the "call for papers" for DebConf19 [36] in
Curitiba, Brazil is now open [37][38]. In addition, registration is
also open for a MiniDebConf in Hamburg during June 2019 [39].

* The "wheezy" and "jessie" suites have been removed from the main
archive [40]. Lucas Nussbaum wrote a useful follow-up blog post
regarding the status of "jessie-updates" [41].

* The Release Team [42] announced the full freeze of 'buster'. [43]

[36] https://debconf19.debconf.org
[37] https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2019/03/msg00007.html
[38] https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2019/03/msg00008.html
[39] https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2019/03/msg00010.html
[40] https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2019/03/msg00006.html
[41] https://www.lucas-nussbaum.net/blog/?p=947
[42] https://wiki.debian.org/Teams/ReleaseTeam
[43] https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2019/03/msg00003.html

~ § ~

Phew. So, it wouldn't be a "Bits from.." without my usual request for
any feedback. Naturally, any other questions or concerns about the
Project that would be inappropriate and/or difficult to bring up
elsewhere are welcome too — please address those to <leader@debian.org>.

See you all… soon. :)


Best wishes,

- --
,''`.
: :' : Chris Lamb
`. `'` lamby@debian.org 🍥 chris-lamb.co.uk
`-

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