Lisandro Damián Nicanor Pérez Meyer lisandropm@identi.ca

Last year we started to push more of Debian news and information away the single news source of the DPN into other media services. Debian has been more active than ever on our many IRC channels, free software based social networks, and unofficial Twitter and Facebook feeds. Today we have decided to announce the next stage in keeping Debian at the forefront of media by sub-contracting publicity and press to an outside marketing agency.

The marketing agency (name will be disclosed soon) has provided an AI system (running entirely with free software) which will be fed with all the content of Debian mailing lists and sources.debian.net to understand the character of the Debian community and then better customize future articles, interviews, and event news.

However, some bits of personal information are also needed. Please install the "publicity" package and you'll be presented a form to fill in your data: name, surname, phone, snail mail address, place of birth, names of family members, employers or employees. Each person providing their data to the agency will receive coupon for a 20% discount in the download (purchase) of next Debian release (valid only for downloads from the official site www.debian.org).

We kindly ask every Debian community member to sign up in, at least, one of theses services: Twitter, Whatsapp, Slack or Facebook (IRC, mailing lists, and free software based RTC are allegedly not so 'cool'). Users need not be concerned with losing the features that the IRC bots provide (so long KGB!) as they will be replaced by Tay-like AI systems. The most visible change will be that MeetBot will no longer log the meetings anymore, but we have bribed an NSA employee so they pass the relevant messages to us.

"If this 'centralization, outsourcing and pay-and-forget' approach goes well with publicity, I'm considering running for DPL in 2017 to extend this model to other areas of Debian" said Laura Arjona Reina, (now) former publicity delegate.

A new logo and mascot has been designed too, as a symbol of this new era embracing the standards of branding and corporate messaging. Please consider voting in favor of it, in the General Resolution that will be proposed soon:

RIP Iceweasel, 13 Nov 2006 – 10 Mar 2016, Firefox is coming back to Debian!

ISumaTV is doing content distribution in Northern regions of Canada using git-annex, and free software built on top of it. I like to imagine this involves bush planes and dog sleds and satellite receivers with my software on them, but I really don't know the human-interest details.

We programmers so rarely do, often all we get to see is the bug reports..

http://www.isuma.tv/media-players-network and http://isuma-media-players.readthedocs.org/en/latest/design.html are an interesting reads anyhow.

My nephew has been learning to code and he asked for a laptop with Linux after somehow managing to write python programs on an Android phone.. So I'm giving him one today.

Russ Allbery on what the result of the Debian init system coupling GR means: https://lists.debian.org/debian-project/2014/11/msg00079.html - I very much like this interpretation.

Debian's developer community decides, that no General Resolution is needed on systemd. Voting outcome is 4>2>3>1>5.

Recent propellor contributions I've received and merged this week: Firewall module, nginx support, prosody support, tor hidden service support!

Whether or not you like systemd (I am mostly positive, have some mixed feelings, explained below, but am mostly uninformed enough to just trust others' decisions), nobody is doing a better job of making systemd look good than the anti-systemd crowd right now.

I trust the Debian process, and systemd looks good for a lot of things. I actually do share some worries others have, but not too strongly (I wonder: what will Guix do if applications become more systemd dependent... will the project give up on GNU dmd as an init system? And also, will this make it hard for "container'ed" applications a-la docker harder? (Answer seems to be yes)). But I will also fully say: I just don't know enough. And again, having watched the Debian process from here, for Debian, I couldn't be more sure that the process went well. And I would love to convert my init scripts over to systemd's init system, that stuff looks a lot nicer.

Nonetheless, I'm nervous to express any of the above... it's hard to not look like I'm not some kind of anti-systemd person. And given that the anti-systemd crowd seems to be about as poisonous as (and even seems to share actual overlap with) "gamergate" type poisonous people... well... who wants to be associated with those jerks?

And whether or not concerns I have are founded/unfounded, I hope systemd and friends continue to improve... it certainly seems like valuable software in most respects.

BTW, I couldn't care less about the "unix philosophy"... my favorite programs seem to be Emacs, Firefox/Iceweasel, Blender, which are all attacked for violating the Unix philosophy, and all work great, maybe even because of it.

it takes more than 85 different services to run a distro like Debian!

"We, the Debian project, can't let that happen. Fun is 
serious business for us: without it we can't get anything 
much done." 

(Lars Wirzenius in https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2014/02/msg00475.html )