We encourage our community to celebrate around the world the 27th Debian anniversary with organized DebianDay events. This year due to the COVID-19 pandemic we cannot organize in-person events, so we ask instead that contributors, developers, teams, groups, maintainers, and users promote The Debian Project and Debian activities online on August 16th (and/or 15th).

Communities can organize a full schedule of online activities throughout the day. These activities can include talks, workshops, active participation with contributions such as translations assistance or editing, debates, BoFs, and all of this in your local language using tools such as Jitsi for capturing audio and video from presenters for later streaming to YouTube.

If you are not aware of any local community organizing a full event or you don't want to join one, you can solo design your own activity using OBS and stream it to YouTube. You can watch an OBS tutorial here.

Don't forget to record your activity as it will be a nice idea to upload it to Peertube later.

Please add your event/activity on the DebianDay wiki page and let us know about and advertise it on Debian micronews. To share it, you have several options:

• Follow the steps listed here for Debian Developers.
• Contact us using IRC in channel #debian-publicity on the OFTC network, and ask us there.
• Send a mail to [email protected] and ask for your item to be included in micronews. This is a publicly archived list.

PS: DebConf20 online is coming! It will be held from August 23rd to 29th, 2020. Registration is already open.

The following contributors got their Debian Developer accounts in the last two months:

• Richard Laager (rlaager)
• Thiago Andrade Marques (andrade)
• Vincent Prat (vivi)
• Michael Robin Crusoe (crusoe)
• Jordan Justen (jljusten)
• Anuradha Weeraman (anuradha)
• Bernelle Verster (indiebio)
• Gabriel F. T. Gomes (gabriel)
• Kurt Kremitzki (kkremitzki)
• Nicolas Mora (babelouest)
• Birger Schacht (birger)
• Sudip Mukherjee (sudip)

The following contributors were added as Debian Maintainers in the last two months:

• Marco Trevisan
• Dennis Braun
• Stephane Neveu
• Seunghun Han
• Alexander Johan Georg Kjäll
• Friedrich Beckmann
• Diego M. Rodriguez
• Nilesh Patra
• Hiroshi Yokota

Congratulations!

On July 18th Stretch LTS starts, offering two more years of security support to the Debian Stretch release. Stretch LTS will be the fourth iteration of LTS, following Squeeze LTS which started in 2014, Wheezy LTS in 2016 and Jessie LTS in 2018.

However, for the first time, we have prepared a small survey about our users and contributors, who they are and why they are using LTS.

Filling out the survey should take less than 10 minutes. We would really appreciate if you could participate in the survey online!

In two weeks (July 27th 2020) we will close the survey, so please don't hesitate and participate now! After that, there will be a followup email with the results.

More information about Debian LTS is available at https://wiki.debian.org/LTS, including generic contact information.

Click here to fill out the survey now!

Eight members of the Debian Perl team met online between May 15 and May 17 2020, in lieu of a planned physical sprint meeting. Work focussed on preparations for bullseye, and continued maintenance of the large number of perl modules maintained by the team.

Whilst an online sprint cannot fully replace an in-person sprint in terms of focussing attention, the weekend was still very productive, and progress was made on a range of topics including:

• Reducing technical debt by removing unmaintained packages
• Beginning packaging and QA for the next major release of perl, 5.32
• Deciding on a team policy for hardening flags
• Addressing concerns with Alien::*, a set of pacakges designed to download source code
• Developing a proposal for debian/NEWS.Developer, to complement debian/NEWS
• Developing a plan to enable SSL verification in HTTP::Tiny by default

The full report was posted to the relevant Debian mailing lists.

The participants would like to thank OpusVL for providing the Jitsi instance for the weekend.

The DebConf team has had to take the hard decision that DebConf 20 cannot happen in-person, in Haifa, in August, as originally planned. This decision is based on the status of the venue in Haifa, the local team's view of the local health situation, the existing travel restrictions and the results of a survey of potential participants.

DebConf 20 will be held online instead!

The Debian community can still get together to share ideas, discuss plans in Birds of a Feather sessions, and eat cheese, from the safety of the desks at home.

So, please submit your talk, sprint, and BoF proposals for DebConf 20 Online.

It will be held within the same dates, as before, 23-29 August. The DebConf team expects the event to be significantly shorter than a usual DebCamp + DebConf, but that will depend on the volume of proposals received.

Hopefully in 2021 we can once again hold conferences in person. DebConf 21 is scheduled to be taking place in Haifa. The following planned DebConfs will be held a year later than originally scheduled: 2022 in Kosovo and 2023 in Kochi, India.

See you online in August!