Misc Developer News (#31)

The news are collected on http://wiki.debian.org/DeveloperNews
Please contribute short news about your work/plans/subproject.

In this issue:
 + amd64 most popular architecture according to popcon
 + Register your media types to the IANA
 + First release of dput-ng in Unstable
 + Recent changes on the Debian QA front
 + Fancy graphs on lintian.d.o

amd64 most popular architecture according to popcon
---------------------------------------------------

 Today, amd64 is the architecture with the greatest number of popcon[1]
 submissions by a narrow margin. When restricted to submissions from
 squeeze users, amd64 has 51% of all submissions and i386 47%.

 [1] http://popcon.debian.org/

Register your media types to the IANA
-------------------------------------

 Please consider registering media types to the IANA before requiring
 their inclusion in the mime-support[2] package. Simplified registration
 procedures for vendor and personal trees are being implemented with the
 update of RFC 4288[3], that states: ''it should rarely, if ever, be
 necessary to use unregistered types. Therefore, use of types in the "x."
 tree is strongly discouraged.'' Charles Plessy has confirmed that the
 process is fairly quick and painless by registering
 text/vnd.debian.copyright[4] for machine-readable Debian copyright files.

  -- Charles Plessy

 [2] http://packages.debian.org/mime-support
 [3] http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-appsawg-media-type-...
 [4] http://www.iana.org/assignments/media-types/text/vnd.debi...

First release of dput-ng in unstable
------------------------------------

 As seen on debian-devel[5], dput-ng has been uploaded to unstable. Please
 feel free to test it, and provide early feedback on it. dput-ng is a
 from-scratch rewrite of dput that provides an identical interface for
 dput, and a slightly modified one for dcut (since most of us had to look
 up the manpage anyway). It supports the new DM permissions, and allows
 for more complex hooks to be written to be run before or after an upload.

  -- Paul Tagliamonte

 [5] http://lists.debian.org/20121204150123.GA24039@chayot

Recent changes on the Debian QA front
-------------------------------------

 The PTS gained knowledge of the new system for DM access controls and of
 upstream URLs that are failing, via the Debian Url ChecKer[6]. The PTS
 had various watch-file related improvements, please check your PTS pages
 before uploading so you can include new/updated watch files. The PTS now
 reports when direct dependencies need a new maintainer. The PTS gained
 semantic information using RDF files.

 The Debian QA infrastructure always needs more folks working on it, so if
 you have some spare time, please check out the code and come join us on
 the debian-qa mailing list and IRC channel.

  -- Paul Wise

 [6] http://duck.debian.net/

Fancy graphs on lintian.d.o
---------------------------

 Lintian.d.o now displays graphs over historical data collected for
 each tag (like[7] these[8]).
 Full credits goes to Jordà Polo for writing the data collection, graph
 generation and even updating the templates to show the graphs inline!

 Besides the graphs, we are also pleased to announce two other great
 changes! First off, it is now possible to mechanically request the
 report for a given source package (without knowing its maintainer) by
 accessing:

  `http://lintian.debian.org/source/<src>[/<src-ver...>]`

 Currently this just redirects to the maintainer's lintian report.
 Secondly, we have extended Lintian's work schedule to include i386
 experimental! Thus, you may now see multiple reports for the same
 source package on your lintian page.

  -- Niels Thykier

 [7] http://lintian.debian.org/tags/package-needs-versioned-de...
 [8] http://lintian.debian.org/tags/debhelper-but-no-misc-depe...

-- 
bye,
pabs

http://wiki.debian.org/PaulWise