The Debian Ruby Ruby team had a first sprint in 2014. The experience was very positive, and it was decided to do it again in 2015. Last April, the team once more met at the IRILL offices, in Paris, France.

The participants worked to improve the quality Ruby packages in Debian, including fixing release critical and security bugs, improving metadata and packaging code, and triaging test failures on the Debian Continuous Integration service.

The sprint also served to prepare the team infrastructure for the future Debian 9 release:

• the gem2deb packaging helper to improve the semi-automated generation of Debian source packages from existing standard-compliant Ruby packages from Rubygems.

• there was also an effort to prepare the switch to Ruby 2.2, the latest stable release of the Ruby language which was released after the Debian testing suite was already frozen for the Debian 8 release.

Left to right: Christian Hofstaedtler, Tomasz Nitecki, Sebastien Badia and Antonio Terceiro.

A full report with technical details has been posted to the relevant Debian mailing lists.

There's a new sheriff in town. And her name is Jessie. We're happy to announce the release of Debian 8.0, codenamed Jessie.

Want to install it? Choose your favourite installation media among Blu-ray Discs, DVDs, CDs and USB sticks. Then read the installation manual. For cloud users Debian also offers pre-built OpenStack images ready to use.

Already a happy Debian user and you only want to upgrade? You are just an apt-get dist-upgrade away from Jessie! Find how, reading the installation guide and the release notes.

Do you want to celebrate the release? Share the banner from this blog in your blog or your website!

We are very pleased to announce that HP has committed support of DebConf15 as Platinum sponsor.

"The hLinux team is pleased to continue HP's long tradition of supporting Debian and DebConf," said Steve Geary, Senior Director at Hewlett-Packard.

Hewlett-Packard is one of the largest computer companies in the world, providing a wide range of products and services, such as servers, PCs, printers, storage products, network equipment, software, cloud computing solutions, etc.

Hewlett-Packard has been a long-term development partner of Debian, and provides hardware for port development, Debian mirrors, and other Debian services (HP hardware donations are listed in the Debian machines page).

With this additional commitment as Platinum Sponsor, HP contributes to make possible our annual conference, and directly supports the progress of Debian and Free Software, helping to strengthen the community who continue to collaborate on their Debian projects throughout the rest of the year.

Thank you very much, Hewlett-Packard, for your support of DebConf15!

Become a sponsor too!

DebConf15 is still accepting sponsors. Interested companies and organizations may contact the DebConf team through sponsors@debconf.org, and visit the DebConf15 website at http://debconf15.debconf.org.

The organization of DebConf15 (from 15 to 22 August 2015, in Heidelberg, Germany) is going smoothly, the call for proposals is open and today we want to provide some updates about our sponsors.

Twelve more companies have joined our nine first sponsors in supporting DebConf15. Thank you to all of them!

Our third Gold sponsor is the Matanel Foundation, which encourages social entrepreneurship in all over the world.

IBM, the technology and consulting corporation, has also joined the DebConf15 sponsorship at a Gold level.

Google, the search engine and advertising company, has increased its sponsorship level from Silver to Gold.

Mirantis, 1&1 (which is also one of Debian's service partners), MySQL and Hudson River Trading have committed sponsorship at Silver level.

And last but not least, six more sponsors have agreed to support us at Bronze level: Godiug.net, the University of Zurich, Deduktiva, Docker, DG-i (which is also one of Debian's service partners), and PricewaterhouseCoopers (which also provides consultancy support for DebConf15).

The DebConf15 team is very thankful to all the DebConf sponsors for their support.

Become a sponsor too!

DebConf15 is still accepting sponsors. Interested companies and organizations may contact the DebConf team through sponsors@debconf.org, and visit the DebConf15 website at http://debconf15.debconf.org.

We'd like to reshare a post from Nicolas Dandrimont.

Hi all,

I am delighted to announce that Debian will be participating in the next round of Outreachy and GSoC, and that we are currently welcoming applications!

Outreachy helps people from groups underrepresented in free and open source software get involved. The current round of internships is open to women (cis and trans), trans men, genderqueer people, and all participants of the Ascend Project regardless of gender.

Google Summer of Code is a global program, sponsored by Google, that offers post-secondary student developers ages 18 and older stipends to write code for various open source software projects.

Interns for both programs are granted a $5500 stipend (in three installments) allowing them to dedicate their summer to working full-time on Debian.

Our amazing team of mentors has listed their project ideas on the Debian wiki, and we are now welcoming applicants for both programs.

If you want to apply for an internship with Debian this summer, please fill out the template for either Outreachy or GSoC. If you’re eligible to both programs, we’ll encourage you to apply to both (using the same application), as Debian only has funds for a single Outreachy intern this round.

Don’t wait up! The application period for Outreachy ends March 24th, and the GSoC application period ends March 27th. We really want applicants to start contributing to their project before making our selection, so that mentors can get a feel of how working with their intern will be like for three months. The small task is a requirement for Outreachy, and we’re strongly encouraging GSoC applicants to abide by that rule too. To contribute in the best conditions, you shouldn’t wait for the last minute to apply :-)

I hope we’ll work with a lot of great interns this summer. If you think you’re up for the challenge, it’s time to apply! If you have any doubts, or any question, drop us a line on the soc-coordination mailing list or come by on our IRC channel (#debian-soc on irc.debian.org) and we’ll do our best to guide you.