Misc Developer News (#43)

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Please contribute short news about your work/plans/subproject.

In this issue:
 + Special reports for package maintainers
 + titanpad.com shutting down
 + Adding the uaccess tag to udev rules
 + Announcing supported hardware via AppStream
 + New lists: RISC-V, Asia/Pacific events, Colombia

Special reports for package maintainers
---------------------------------------

 There are some daily reports[1], all based in UDD[2], which can be used
 by maintainers to know about packages in Debian.

 The currently available reports are:

  * "Statistics to Choose a Debian Package to Help"[3]: this report has
    several sections. The fist section lists all source packages in
    Debian, with some data about each one, sorted by date of the last
    upload to Sid. As an example, based in this report, you can choose a
    good package to do a QA upload or a NMU work.
  * "Top 500 NEW source packages in Debian Sid"[4]: lists the most recent
    NEW packages in Sid.
  * "Uploaders to Debian Sid Ranking"[5]: this is a report for current and
    previous years that shows a ranking, by uploads, including QA and NMU,
    about all people that sent packages to Sid.

  -- Joao Eriberto Mota Filho (eriberto)

 [1] https://people.debian.org/~eriberto/udd/
 [2] https://wiki.debian.org/UltimateDebianDatabase
 [3] https://people.debian.org/~eriberto/udd/help_a_package.html
 [4] https://people.debian.org/~eriberto/udd/top_500_new.html
 [5] https://people.debian.org/~eriberto/udd/uploaders_ranking...

titanpad.com shutting down
--------------------------

 titanpad.com is shutting down[6] after more than 6 years of service.
 If your team is using titanpad, you may want to switch to an alternative
 service before the deadline of 2017-12-31. Some alternatives include:

  * Debian's gobby service[7], which requires a locally installed client
    to edit and has http plain text export but does not yet[8] have a web
    editing interface
  * Richard Darst's whiteboard service[9], which is based on google-mobwrite
  * Asheesh Laroia's Sandstorm service[10], which hosts other services too
  * Alexander Wirt's paste service[11], which doesn't allow for real-time
    collaborative editing
  * various Etherpad sites that can be found with a web search or at the
    URLs mentioned in the announcement[12].

 The following IRC channels have titanpad URLs in their topics and may
 want to backup and or migrate their data: #alioth #debian-berlin
 #debian-forensics #debian-gnome #debian-newmaint #debian-systemd
 #debian-x #siduction-manual

  -- Paul Wise

 [6] http://blog.titanpad.com/2016/11/shutting-down-titanpad_1...
 [7] https://gobby.debian.org/
 [8] https://github.com/gobby/gobby/issues/9
 [9] http://whiteboard.debian.net/
 [10] http://storm.debian.net/
 [11] https://paste.debian.net/
 [12] http://blog.titanpad.com/2016/11/shutting-down-titanpad_1...

Adding the uaccess tag to udev rules
------------------------------------

 Packages containing udev rules that use GROUP="plugdev" should also add
 TAG+="uaccess" so that all users that are physically present can access
 the relevant devices, instead of just users in the plugdev group
 (GROUP="plugdev"). Some packages use MODE="666" to allow all users
 (including remote users) to access devices. For almost all devices it is
 probably more appropriate to switch from MODE="666" to GROUP="plugdev",
 MODE="660", TAG+="uaccess" so that remote users cannot access local
 devices. Check the wiki page for USB gadgets[13] for more hints.
 There is a lintian warning in progress[14] for these issues.

  -- Paul Wise & Petter Reinholdtsen

 [13] https://wiki.debian.org/USB/GadgetSetup
 [14] https://bugs.debian.org/841670

Announcing supported hardware via AppStream
-------------------------------------------

 If you are maintaining a package that supports a specific set of
 hardware, it would be great if you could add[15] some metadata about
 which hardware is supported. By doing so, you will enable users to
 discover your package when they plug in a new device supported by your
 package. Users can use the isenkram[16] package to discover packages
 related to their hardware. If your package contains udev rules, it
 probably needs some AppStream metadata.

  -- Paul Wise & Petter Reinholdtsen

 [15] https://wiki.debian.org/AppStream/Guidelines#Announcing_s...
 [16]
http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Using_appstream_wi...

New lists: RISC-V, Asia/Pacific events, Colombia
------------------------------------------------

 Three new mailing lists have been created by the listmasters:

  * debian-riscv[17] for porting Debian to free and open RISC-V CPU[18] arch
  * debian-events-apac[19] for Debian events in the Asia/Pacific region
  * debian-dug-co[20] for the Debian user community in Colombia

  -- Paul Wise

 [17] https://lists.debian.org/debian-riscv/
 [18] https://riscv.org/
 [19] https://lists.debian.org/debian-events-apac/
 [20] https://lists.debian.org/debian-dug-co/

-- 
bye,
pabs

https://wiki.debian.org/PaulWise