In this year, Qt3 has got a few QA uploads with the most relevant change being support to multiarch. And, more importantly, nobody seemed to care enough to step into maintaining it.

In the last days, I have taken a look into how much needed to be done to remove Qt3 and there were slightly more than 50 packages depending directly or indirectly from Qt3. A removal from Wheezy seemed doable given that removing packages is never a problem during the Debian freeze ;-)
All the packages affected have a bug opened since more than one year and half ago and I have pinged all the bugs with some maintainers responding quick (thanks!). I also filed some removals for packages that were clearly unmaintained and didn’t seem worth keeping, with ftp-masters responding quick too (Thanks!). And finally, a couple of QA upload for orphaned software that were still useful without Qt3.

There is a wiki page tracking the status of the removal if you are curious:
http://wiki.debian.org/qt3-x11-freeRemoval

If in the future, you are reading this and you need Qt3 in Wheezy, you can fetch it from Debian snapshots.

The result is this year we’ll have 15 students in Debian versus 9 students last year! Without further ado, here is the list of projects and student who will be working with us this summer:

• Create Lintian reports frontend by Abhishek Kumar
• SysV-init file creator from systemd service files by Akhil Vij
• Clang support for build services by Alexander Pashaliyski
• Provide an alternative to libstdc++ with libc++ by Andrej Belym
• Multi-archive support for dak by Ansgar Burchardt
• improving the online package review interface for mentors.debian.net by Baptiste Mouterde
• Pluggable Acquire-System for APT by Bogdan Purcareata
• Semantic Package Review Interface for mentors.debian.net by Clément Schreiner
• Port bootstrap build-ordering tool by Johannes Schauer
• Virtual Image creation web interface by Miguel Gaiowski
• PyPI to Debian repository converter by Natalia Frydrych
• Bootstrappable Debian by Patrick “P. J.” McDermott
• Improve debian-installer network setup by Sorina Sandu
• Multiarch Cross-Toolchains by Thibaut Girka
• Improving Debian Team Activity Metrics by Vipin Nair

If you want to know more about these projects, follow the links and ask the students (and mentors)!

Now we are looking for students to work this summer with us in one of our exciting projects. If you are interested, now would be a good time to get in touch with the mentors; remember that discussing your application before submitting it is always recommended so that you can get feedback from the community.
Please also read the FAQ and timeline in the Google Summer of Code website.

Besides contacting with the mentors, you can also get in touch with us on our IRC channel #debian-soc (in irc.debian.org) and the soc-coordination mailing list if you have any questions.

I am hoping to see many great applications from students wainting to improve Debian :)

NMUs by Mònica:

• t1lib #646470 This one had a patch by Colin Watson and Loïc Minier
• torcs: #646469 and 636009
• slsqlite: #646487
• webdruid: #646499
• vilistextum: #646501

Funny, there were a couple of NMUs by others uploading patchs by Mònica.

NMUs by Ana:

• uw-imap: #646481 This one had a patch by Aurélien Jarno.
• remind: #643466
• sipcalc: #646502
• libcsoap: #643420
• tuxpaint: #556509 With patch by Georgios M. Zarkadas.

I also closed #646449 (libosip2) that has been fixed in a new release upload, sponsored a NMU to Sven Joachim who had a patch sitting in the BTS for a month NMU-fixing #646147 (lie), sponsored dbus-c++ and reviewed for sponsoring a new version inspircd.

We are hoping to get accepted and improve our outcome from last year. To achieve this, we need the help of more Debian contributors proposing and mentoring simple tasks for the students. Please take a take a look at the archives in the mailing list and join us with your proposals.
The list of tasks is at http://wiki.debian.org/GoogleCodeIn2011/Applying, we are specially missing translation and training tasks!

You can also join us in the IRC channel #debian-soc (irc.oftc.net)

If you want to have Qt 3 in wheezy, now is the time to step up! Please, read this email and reply in list.

The list of Debian projects includes a nice variety of projects:

• If you are into Python, take a look at the project for writing a tool to automate building Python extensions.
• Do you want to contribute to improving the relation of Debian with its derivatives? The DEX tools project is for you.
• If you have good web scripting skills, you might be interested in helping creating the Debian talks database.
• Are you into data mining? Check the Measuring Team Performance project.
• You would like to make Iceweasel better? The Iceweasel plugin finder needs you.
• Are you missing a system where developers can publish and auto-build their temporary non-official packages? You can make it real with the Developer Package Repositories project.
• There is more at our projects page !

There is only one week left, so do not leave it for last minute. Get in touch with the mentors of the projects you are interested in and add your proposal to the Debian wiki and in Google Melange.

If you are a Debian contributor wanting to mentor a project, you still can. Please read this email with some hints.

If you are looking for a good idea/excuse to learn and improve your KDE 4 / C++ /Qt4 skills, have to do a small application for school or you just feel like some useful coding, here is the list:

• creox – real-time guitar effects
• kbarcode – barcode and label printing application for KDE
• kbiff – KDE mail notification utility
• KKBSwitch – keyboard layout indicator for KDE (see this post also)
• kmyfirewall – iptables based firewall configuration tool for KDE
• kpogre – a graphical administrator tool for PostgreSQL
• kredentials – KDE taskbar applet to update kerberos/AFS credentials
• ksociograma – technical educational software to make sociograms
• ktechlab – circuit simulator for microcontrollers and electronics
• qalculate-kde – Powerful and easy to use desktop calculator – KDE version
• score-reading-trainer – trainer for reading music notes

Note that I do not list here software whose port in KDE 4 is being developed although it is still not finished and therefore it is not packaged in Debian.

By the way, even if all those packages are being removed from Debian testing and unstable, they will remain in Squeeze, so you can keep using them or install it from there.

I have been in an ‘upload frenzy’ since yesterday night and I have updated some packages in unstable: KOffice[1] and KOffice-l10n 2.3.1, yakuake, rsibreak and tintin++. Another of my packages, kid3, got magically updated itself in unstable before I had time to look at it, the magic of having active co-maintainers.

[1] Thanks for the gentle push to update this, Pino :)

I also emailed one of my upstream maintainers to ask him about the KDE 4 version of his application and he will likely make a release soon. One of the goals for wheezy is remove completely KDE 3 and Qt 3. If you are maintaining a KDE 3 or Qt 3 based application, we are about to start annoying you about this! See http://wiki.debian.org/kdelibs4c2aRemoval and http://wiki.debian.org/qt3-x11-freeRemoval

The last 2 weeks before the release I had some fun watching how the Squeeze release countdown banner I published at http://news.debian.net spread to a lot of websites, personal blogs, community sites, forums to news portals.
The traffic has been increasing little by little through the 2 weeks the banner has been online and currently is still moderately high, since people keeps retweeting the news item about the Debian release. While writing these lines, the banner has been served 449575 times to a total of 244975 unique IP addresses!

We got a moderate success since we started preparing the contest very late (I joined as mentor/admin the very first day of the contest!). Because of this, unlike other organizations, we did not manage to engage interested students from the very beginning of the Code-in. Since we did not have too many Debian tasks the first days, we did not attract many students, and thus did not have very many throughout the contest.

Given Debian tasks were mostly about improving and contributing to Debian, it was quite hard having tasks that did not require having a Debian installation and that made it difficult for many students to get involved. Also, until the last two weeks we did not have any translation task that could have attracted earlier students without too much confidence in their technical and English skills.

Nonetheless, Debian got 39 tasks done:

• 9 ‘write manpages’ tasks, resulting in ~35 manpages submitted to the BTS
• 14 ‘triage bugs’ tasks, resulting in 42 bugs triaged in the BTS
• 4 new packages created
• 1 QA upload
• 1 video showing Squeeze’s artwork
• http://wiki.debian.org/IntroDebianPackaging got translated into Spanish, Italian, Catalan and Romanian. And http://wiki.debian.org/UsingGit got translated into Italian.
• elinks got some nice icons
• dpkg got a small enhacement and a manpage for deb-src-control
• an initial draft of how to create a BOINC project with Debian
• and update-notifier-kde got a reboot option.

With about 30 students participating and at least one of the students has keep contributing to Debian after the contest!

The contest was sometimes stressful with several students wanting their tasks to be reviewed at the same time, and the date was problematic due to the winter (or summer!) holidays but still I am quite happy with the final result :D

Debian will be also participating again this year in the Google Summer of Code 2011. Join the soc-coordination mailing list and stay tunned if you want to participate as mentor or student.