Debian is thrilled to participate in the 9th round of the GNOME FOSS Outreach Program. While OPW is similar to Google Summer of Code it has a winter session in addition to a summer session and is open to non-students.

Back at DebConf 14 several of us decided to volunteer because we want to increase diversity in Debian. Shortly thereafter the DPL announced Debian's participation in OPW 2014.

We have reached out to several corporate sponsors and are thrilled that so far Intel has agreed to fund an intern slot (in addition to the slot offered by the DPL)! While that makes two funded slots we have a third sponsor that has offered a challenge match: for each dollar donated by an individual to Debian the sponsor will donate another dollar for Debian OPW.

This is where we need your help! If we can raise $3,125 by October 22 that means we can mentor a third intern ($6,250). Please spread the word and donate today if you can at: http://debian.ch/opw2014/

If you'd like to participate as intern, the application deadline is the same (October 22nd). You can find out more on the Debian Wiki.

Today is Debian's 21st anniversary. Plenty of cities are celebrating Debian Day. If you are not close to any of those cities, there's still time for you to organize a little celebration!

Happy 21st birthday Debian!

Debconf14 will be held in three weeks in Portland, OR, USA and we're happy to announce that the schedule is already available. Of course, it is still possible for some minor changes to happen!

DebConf will open on Saturday, August 23 with the Welcome talk followed by two highlighted talks:

• Debian in the Dark Ages of Free Software by Stefano Zacchiroli, former Debian Project Leader. Stefano will speak about the achievements realized by Free Software communities in the past years, andhow now, despite the visible success, this freedom is being threatened by the current technology trends, and how can Debian help to preserve the so well deserved freedom.

• Weapons of the Geek by Biella Coleman, cultural anthropologist, who researches, writes, and teaches on computer hackers and digital activism will share with us part of her research, explaining how online communities can have a big impact on world politics today.

There will also be also a plethora of social events, such as our traditional cheese and wine party, our group photo and our day trip.

The complete schedule can be found at: https://summit.debconf.org/debconf14/

DebConf talks will be broadcast live on the Internet when possible, and videos of the talks will be published on the web along with the presentation slides.

The Debian Linux kernel team has discussed and chosen the kernel version to use as a basis for Debian 8 'jessie'.

This will be Linux 3.16, due to be released in early August. Release candidates for Linux 3.16 are already packaged and available in the experimental suite.

If you maintain a package that is closely bound to the kernel version - a kernel module or a userland application that depends on an unstable API - please ensure that it is compatible with Linux 3.16 prior to the freeze date (5th November, 2014). Incompatible packages are very likely to be removed from testing and not included in 'jessie'.

1. My kernel module package doesn't build on 3.16 and upstream is not interested in supporting this version. What can I do? The kernel team might be able to help you with forward-porting, but also try Linux Kernel Newbies or the mailing list(s) for the relevant kernel subsystem(s).

2. There's an important new kernel feature that ought to go into jessie, but it won't be in 3.16. Can you still add it? Maybe - sometimes this is easy and sometimes it's too disruptive to the rest of the kernel. Please contact the team on the debian-kernel mailinglist or by opening a wishlist bug.

3. Will Linux 3.16 get long term support from upstream? The Linux 3.16-stable branch will not be maintained as a longterm branch at kernel.org. However, the Ubuntu kernel team will continue to maintain that branch, following the same rules for acceptance and review, until around April 2016. Ben Hutchings is planning to continue maintenance from then until the end of regular support for 'jessie'.

Debian is a big system. At the time of writing, the unstable distribution has more than 20,000 source packages, building more then 40,000 binary packages on the amd64 architecture. The number of inter-dependencies between binary packages is mind-boggling: the entire dependency graph for the amd64 architecture contains a little more than 375,000 edges. If you want to expand the phrase "package A depends on package B", there are more than 375,000 pairs of packages A and B that can be used.

Every one of these dependencies is a potential source of problems. A library changes the semantics of a function call, and then programs using that library that assumed the previous semantics can start to malfunction. A new version of your favorite programming language comes out, and a program written in it no longer works. The number of ways in which things can go wrong goes on and on.

With an ecosystem as big as Debian, it is just impossible to stop these problems from happening. What we can do is trying to detect when they happen, and fix them as soon as possible.

The Debian Continuous Integration project was created to address exactly this problem. It will continuously run test suites for source packages when any of their dependencies is updated, as well as when a new version of the package itself is uploaded to the unstable distribution. If any problems that can be detected by running an automated test suite arise, package maintainers can be notified in a matter of hours.

Antonio Terceiro has posted on his blog an introduction to the project with a more detailed description of the project, its evolution since January 2014 when it was first introduced, an explanation of how the system works, and how maintainers can enable test suites for their packages. You might also want to check the documentation directly.