The last weeks before a Debian release are usually boring with respect to working on new stuff since unstable is pretty much closed to development. Now that the release is finished, this fun is back \o/

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.netspread 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!

As you might know, Debian was one of the 20 organizations selected to participate in the first Google Code-in.

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.

It took a bit of time due to the holidays, but KOffice 2.3.0 is finally available from Debian experimental (give some hours to your mirror to sync!). If you are unstable user don't be afraid to fetch it from experimental, it is there only because the Squeeze freeze. Squeeze will ship with KOffice 2.2.1, while not all the applications are so polished as it would be desirable, it clearly offers huge improvements over old KOffice 1.6.3.

I do not know if there will be a KOffice 2.3.1 upload but I know for sure the future is with Calligra :)