Debian Weekly News - 2005 Timeline

This special supplement to Debian Weekly News is a review of the most important happenings of 2005 in the Debian community. This is certainly not a comprehensive list. The focus is on unusual and notable events, not the continual background development activity and discussions.

To give some idea of the sheer volume of what has gone on behind the scenes this year, a few numbers: More than 30 thousand package uploads have been done, more than 300 security advisories have been issued, about 50 thousand bug reports were filed this year, in total about 160 thousand messages were sent to the bug tracking system, 740 thousand messages were posted to the various Debian mailing lists, the English DWN source used about 610 kB and the Debian project attended more than 30 events.

Here are the most memorable events of 2005 in the Debian community:

January

Martin Michlmayr announced that Jörg Jaspert has been appointed as an additional Debian account manager.
Michael Koch considered the free Java implementations in good shape to run major applications.
Russell Coker stated that devfs is regarded as obsolete in the kernel source and will be removed in July 2005.
The Debian Women group held an IRC meeting on January 16th.
Gervase Markham from the Mozilla Foundation proposed a trademark agreement for Debian Firefox and Thunderbird packages.

February

William Sowerbutts reported that he has Debian running on his new Mac Mini.
Jörg Jaspert sent in a status report about the DAM (Debian Account Manager) work.
Branden Robinson is soliciting input on whether he should nominate himself again for the Debian project leader (DPL) elections.
Martin 'Joey' Schulze reported about the wayback machine for Debian packages that Fumitoshi Ukai (鵜飼文敏) provides on snapshot.debian.net.

March

The Debian project announced its presence at six conferences and exhibitions.
The developers had to choose among six candidates for the role of Debian Project Leader (DPL).
Jeroen van Wolffelaar announced the project Scud.
Martin F. Krafft announced an IRC debate for the upcoming project leader election.
The proposal from the Vancouver meeting was discussed controversial on the debian-devel list.
The 300000th bug was opened.
James Troup announced the addition of two developers to the ftpmaster team.
Steve Langasek announced plans for the release after sarge that includes splitting the Debian archive into a regular and a second class component.

April

A Hurd live CD has recently seen the light.
Hanna Wallach wrote an essay about making Debian a friendlier place for both men and women.
After running as project leader candidate since 2001 Branden Robinson eventually won the election in 2005.
According to analyst house IDC, Free Software is gaining ground in Europe.

May

Many people are pleased that the NEW queue is processed again.
In light of the upcoming release of sarge, the debian-release list has seen a flood of requests to update packages in sarge.
Lars Wirzenius wrote down his thoughts about automatic testing of Debian packages.
Richard Stallman called for support and help freeing the computer BIOS.
Michael Banck managed to get GNOME compile and run on GNU/Hurd.
Nokia has released an Internet tablet PC that uses Debian as operating system.

June

The Debian project announced the release of Debian GNU/Linux 3.1 alias sarge.
There was a lot of discussion on release goals and the release team for etch.
The fifth annual market survey reported that Debian was the most popular distribution in embedded systems.
Andreas Barth announced changes in the release policy for the etch release.
Norbert Preining announced to package TeXlive, one of the most complete TeX systems.

July

David Nusinow announced Debian packages for X.Org.
The Debian project announced the sixth annual Debian conference held at the Computer Science department of the Helsinki University of Technology.
Matthias Klose announced the start of the GCC and C++ transition.
Frank Lichtenheld planned to organise the removal of non-free documentation from Debian.
Nikita Youshchenko asked about the status of the multi architecture proposal.

August

Florian Weimer wondered how the Debian Core Consortium was related to the Debian project.
Helen Faulkner announced the creation of the debian-science mailing list.
Wichert Akkerman mentioned that Debian maintainers have always assumed full responsibility for their work within Debian.
The Debian project announced to support the stable amd64 port security-wise from now on.
Sean Michael Kerner reported about Debian's debut in China with Sun Wah's enterprise Debian offering.
Debian mourns the loss of Jens Schmalzing (also known as jensen) who died on July 30th in a tragic accident at his workplace in Munich, Germany.

September

Christoph Berg created a Debian quiz where you can test your knowledge about Debian.
In March Steve McIntyre announced plans to found the Debian UK Society.
Joey Hess announced the beginning of full security support for Debian's testing distribution.
Neil McGovern announced sponsors.debian.net.
Anthony Towns announced the availability of user tags for the bug tracking system.
Marc Brockschmidt reported about significant changes in the new maintainer process.
Wouter Verhelst noticed that the bug tracking system has gotten a new layout and even uses cascading style sheets like the main website.
Holger Levsen announced the creation of a Debian meeting archive.

October

Colin Watson announced his resignation from the release team.
Andreas Barth reported about the productive meeting of the QA team in Darmstadt, Germany.
The Debian project announced that the security network has been improved.
Alex Ross announced that he has compiled large chunks of Debian packages for a system based on the open Solaris kernel.
Steve Langasek proposed a timeline for the release of etch.

November

Robert Millan announced version 1.0 of Ging, the only live distribution based on Debian GNU/kFreeBSD.
Anthony Towns proposed a general resolution to open the archives of the debian-private list to the public after three years.
Branden Robinson released a document explaining how project leader delegations work.
Enrico Zini announced an experimental search engine for Debian packages on the basis of debtags information.

December

Tom Adelstein explained how he switched from several other distributions to Debian GNU/Linux and why it serves him best.
Ingo Jürgensmann announced the inclusion of armeb, hurd-i386, kfreebsd-i386 and m32r on buildd.net.
Norbert Tretkowski announced, that backports.org eventually supports the current stable Debian release code-named sarge.
Steve Langasek, member of the Debian release team, informed about the end of the architecture requalification phase.
The City of Munich published an update about their migration to a Debian-based GNU/Linux solution.

As Debian Weekly News enters its eighth year, we would like to thank everybody who contributed to DWN in the past. Special thanks also go to the hoard of translators who make DWN available in a dozen languages. And finally, thanks to everyone in the Debian community for providing such a plethora of interesting discussions, events, and hard work for us to report on.

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Debian Weekly News is edited by Martin 'Joey' Schulze.