It has been one week since I'm back from DebConf14 and I'm still recovering and catching up with things. DebConf14 has been amazing, it has been great to be back after missing it for two years. Thanks a lot to everybody who helped to make it real. On my side, I helped a bit in the talks team.

During DebConf14, I got the opportunity to discuss with Rene Mayorga about the MIA work-flow and we also got some feedback in the MIA BoF. We have plenty of ideas to implement and we're aiming to improve things during this next year.

This summer has been also 10 years since I started contributing to Debian. It's hard to believe. Ten years ago I barely knew where to start helping and now I have an endless TODO list of things I would like to do. And always during DebConf this list seems to grow ten times faster than usual. Thankfully, also motivation increases a lot :)

A couple of weeks ago was the first anniversary of orphaning Qt3 in Debian, see bug 625502.

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.

This year our efforts have paid off and despite there being more mentoring organizations than there were in 2011 (175 in 2011 and 180 in 2012), this year in Debian we got 81 submissions versus 43 submissions in 2011.
You can see here the graphs of applications against time from this year:

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)!