The following contributors got their Debian Developer accounts in the last two months:

• Paride Legovini (paride)
• Ana Custura (acute)
• Felix Lechner (lechner)

The following contributors were added as Debian Maintainers in the last two months:

• Sven Geuer
• Håvard Flaget Aasen

Congratulations!

We are happy to announce that registration for DebConf20 is now open. The event will take place from August 23rd to 29th, 2020 at the University of Haifa, in Israel, and will be preceded by DebCamp, from August 16th to 22nd.

Although the Covid-19 situation is still rather fluid, as of now, Israel seems to be on top of the situation. Days with less than 10 new diagnosed infections are becoming common and businesses and schools are slowly reopening. As such, we are hoping that, at least as far as regulations go, we will be able to hold an in-person conference. There is more (and up to date) information at the conference's FAQ. Which means, barring a second wave, that there is reason to hope that the conference can go forward.

For that, we need your help. We need to know, assuming health regulations permit it, how many people intend to attend. This year probably more than ever before, prompt registration is very important to us. If after months of staying at home you feel that rubbing elbows with fellow Debian Developers is precisely the remedy that will salvage 2020, then we ask that you do register as soon as possible.

Sadly, things are still not clear enough for us to make a final commitment to holding an in-person conference, but knowing how many people intend to attend will be a great help in making that decision. The deadline for deciding on postponing, cancelling or changing the format of the conference is June 8th.

To register for DebConf20, please visit our website and log into the registration system and fill out the form. You can always edit or cancel your registration, but please note that the last day to confirm or cancel is July 26th, 2020 23:59:59 UTC. We cannot guarantee availability of accommodation, food and swag for unconfirmed registrations.

We do suggest that attendees begin making travel arrangements as soon as possible, of course. Please bear in mind that most air carriers allow free cancellations and changes.

Any questions about registrations should be addressed to registration@debconf.org.

Bursary for travel, accomodation and meals

In an effort to widen the diversity of DebConf attendees, the Debian Project allocates a part of the financial resources obtained through sponsorships to pay for bursaries (travel, accommodation, and/or meals) for participants who request this support when they register.

As resources are limited, we will examine the requests and decide who will receive the bursaries. They will be destined:

• Debian funded bursaries are available to active Debian contributors.
• Debian diversity bursaries are available to newcomers to Debian/DebConf. Especially from under-represented communities.

Giving a talk, organizing an event or helping during DebConf20 is taken into account when deciding upon your bursary, so please mention them in your bursary application.

For more information about bursaries, please visit Applying for a Bursary to DebConf

Attention: deadline to apply for bursaries using the registration form before May 31st, 2019 23:59:59 UTC. This deadline is necessary in order to the organisers to have some time to analyze the requests.

To register for the Conference, either with or without a bursary request, please visit: https://debconf20.debconf.org/register

Participation to DebConf20 is conditional to your respect of our Code of Conduct. We require you to read, understand and abide by this code.

DebConf would not be possible without the generous support of all our sponsors, especially our Platinum Sponsor Lenovo and Gold Sponsors deepin and Matanel Foundation. DebConf20 is still accepting sponsors; if you are interested, or think you know of others who would be willing to help, please get in touch!

We are very excited to announce that Debian has selected nine interns to work under mentorship on a variety of projects with us during the Google Summer of Code.

Here are the list of the projects, students, and details of the tasks to be performed.

Project: Android SDK Tools in Debian

• Student(s): Manas Kashyap, Raman Sarda, and Samyak-jn

Deliverables of the project: Make the entire Android toolchain, Android Target Platform Framework, and SDK tools available in the Debian archives.

Project: Packaging and Quality assurance of COVID-19 relevant applications

• Student: Nilesh

Deliverables of the project: Quality assurance including bug fixing, continuous integration tests and documentation for all Debian Med applications that are known to be helpful to fight COVID-19

Project: BLAS/LAPACK Ecosystem Enhancement

• Student: Mo Zhou

Deliverables of the project: Better environment, documentation, policy, and lintian checks for BLAS/LAPACK.

Project: Quality Assurance and Continuous integration for applications in life sciences and medicine

• Student: Pranav Ballaney

Deliverables of the project: Continuous integration tests for all Debian Med applications, QA review, and bug fixes.

Project: Systemd unit translator

• Student: K Gopal Krishna

Deliverables of the project: A systemd unit to OpenRC init script translator. Updated OpenRC package into Debian Unstable.

Project: Architecture Cross-Grading Support in Debian

• Student: Kevin Wu

Deliverables of the project: Evaluate, test, and develop tools to evaluate cross-grade checks for system and user configuration.

Project: Upstream/Downstream cooperation in Ruby

• Student: utkarsh2102

Deliverables of the project: Create guide for rubygems.org on good practices for upstream maintainers, develop a tool that can detect problems and, if possible fix those errors automatically. Establish good documentation, design the tool to be extensible for other languages.

Congratulations and welcome to all the interns!

The Google Summer of Code program is possible in Debian thanks to the efforts of Debian Developers and Debian Contributors that dedicate part of their free time to mentor interns and outreach tasks.

Join us and help extend Debian! You can follow the interns' weekly reports on the debian-outreach mailing-list, chat with us on our IRC channel or reach out to the individual projects' team mailing lists.

The Debian Project Leader elections just finished and the winner is Jonathan Carter!

His term as project leader starts next Tuesday April 21st and expires on April 20th 2021.

Of a total of 1011 developers, 339 developers voted using the Condorcet method. More information about the result is available in the Debian Project Leader Elections 2020 page.

Many thanks to Jonathan Carter, Sruthi Chandran and Brian Gupta for running.

And special thanks to Sam Hartman for his service as DPL during these last twelve months!

The following contributors got their Debian Developer accounts in the last two months:

• Gard Spreemann (gspr)
• Jonathan Bustillos (jathan)
• Scott Talbert (swt2c)

The following contributors were added as Debian Maintainers in the last two months:

• Thiago Andrade Marques
• William Grzybowski
• Sudip Mukherjee
• Birger Schacht
• Michael Robin Crusoe
• Lars Tangvald
• Alberto Molina Coballes
• Emmanuel Arias
• Hsieh-Tseng Shen
• Jamie Strandboge

Congratulations!