My Debian Activities in May 2015

FTP assistant

This month I marked 235 packages for accept and rejected 44 of them. I know, the NEW-queue is rather large, but the numbers are showing a downward trend again.

In the light of recent events I would like to cite two things. The US Copyright Office Circular 14 says about derivative work:

A typical example of a derivative work received for registration in the Copyright Office is one that is primarily a new work but incorporates some previously published material. This previously published material makes the work a derivative work under the copyright law. To be copyrightable, a derivative work must be different enough from the original to be regarded as a “new work” or must contain a substantial amount of new material. Making minor changes or additions of little substance to a preexisting work will not qualify the work as a new version for copyright purposes. The new material must be original and copyrightable in itself. Titles, short phrases, and format, for example, are not copyrightable.

Title 17 of the United States Code says in §103:

The copyright in a compilation or derivative work extends only to the material contributed by the author of such work, as distinguished from the preexisting material employed in the work, and does not imply any exclusive right in the preexisting material. The copyright in such work is independent of, and does not affect or enlarge the scope, duration, ownership, or subsistence of, any copyright protection in the preexisting material.

Squeeze LTS

This was my eleventh month that I did some work for the Squeeze LTS initiative, started by Raphael Hertzog at Freexian.

This month I got assigned a workload of only 10.25h and I spent most of it to prepare a new upload of ruby1.9.1. The other stuff I uploaded was

• [DLA 222-1] commons-httpclient security update
• [DLA 226-1] ntfs-3g security update
• [DLA 226-2] ntfs-3g regression update
• [DLA 235-1] ruby1.9.1 security update

[DLA 222-1 has been “only” a sponsored upload, where Markus Koschany prepared the patches. [DLA-226] needed two uploads as the first patch turned out to be incomplete. I also marked CVEs in the security tracker as for Squeeze or added notes for future processing.
The next big adventure in June will be another upload of PHP5.

Other stuff

This month I also uploaded feynmf to take care of the new TDS tree (#766287).

Donations

Again, thanks alot to all donors. I really appreciate this and hope that everybody is pleased with my commitment. Don’t hesitate to make suggestions for improvements.