The Debian project is pleased to announce the sixth update of its stable distribution Debian 9 (codename stretch). This point release mainly adds corrections for security issues, along with a few adjustments for serious problems. Security advisories have already been published separately and are referenced where available.

Please note that the point release does not constitute a new version of Debian 9 but only updates some of the packages included. There is no need to throw away old stretch media. After installation, packages can be upgraded to the current versions using an up-to-date Debian mirror.

Those who frequently install updates from security.debian.org won't have to update many packages, and most such updates are included in the point release.

New installation images will be available soon at the regular locations.

• Record number of uploads of a Debian package in an arbitrary 24-hour window

  Seeing the latest post from Chris Lamb made me wonder: how hard would it be to do better? Splitting by date is rather arbitrary (the split may even depend on the timezone you’re using when you’re doing the query), so let’s try to find out the maximum number of uploads that happened for each package in any 24 hour window.

• Record number of uploads of a Debian package in a day

  bunk looks at dxvk and wonders whether 9 uploads of a package on 1 day are a record

• My Free Software Activities in October 2018

• Jonathan Dowland: duc

  The GUI and CGI resemble the fantastic Filelight KDE tool, which I've always preferred to the similar tools available for GNOME, Windows or macOS. (duc itself works fine on macOS). The CGI could be deployed on my NAS, but I haven't set it up yet.

• Neil McGovern: GNOME ED update – October

  As per usual, our main focus has been on the hiring of new staff members for the Foundation. We’ve completed a few second interviews and a couple of first interviews. We’re aiming to start making offers around the end of November. If you have put in an application, and haven’t heard back in a while, please don’t worry! It’s simply due to a large number of people who’ve applied and the very manual way we’ve had to process these. Everyone should hear back.

  We’ve also had some interesting times with our banking. The short version is, we’ve moved banks to another provider. This has taken quite a bit of work, but hopefully, this should be settling down now.

• New and improved Frikanalen Kodi addon version 0.0.3

  If you read my blog regularly, you probably know I am involved in running and developing the Norwegian TV channel Frikanalen. It is an open channel, allowing everyone in Norway to publish videos on a TV channel with national coverage. You can think of it as Youtube for national television. In addition to distribution on RiksTV and Uninett, Frikanalen is also available as a Kodi addon. The last few days I have updated the code to add more features. A new and improved version 0.0.3 Frikanalen addon was just made available via the Kodi repositories. This new version include a option to browse videos by category, as well as free text search in the video archive. It will now also show the video duration in the video lists, which were missing earlier. A new and experimental link to the HD video stream currently being worked on is provided, for those that want to see what the CasparCG output look like. The alternative is the SD video stream, generated using MLT. CasparCG is controlled by our mltplayout server which instead of talking to mlt is giving PLAY instructions to the CasparCG server when it is time to start a new program.

• New Debian Developers and Maintainers (September and October 2018)

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

  Joseph Herlant (aerostitch)
  Aurélien Couderc (coucouf)
  Dylan Aïssi (daissi)
  Kunal Mehta (legoktm)
  Ming-ting Yao Wei (mwei)
  Nicolas Braud-Santoni (nicoo)
  Pierre-Elliott Bécue (peb)
  Stephen Gelman (ssgelm)
  Daniel Echeverry (epsilon)
  Dmitry Bogatov (kaction)

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

  Sagar Ippalpalli
  Kurt Kremitzki
  Michal Arbet
  Daniel Pocock
  Peter Wienemann
  Alexis Bienvenüe
  Gard Spreemann

  Congratulations!

• Paul Wise: FLOSS Activities October 2018

• Ben Hutchings: Debian LTS work, October 2018

• Time for an official MIME type for patches?

  As part of my involvement in the Nikita archive API project, I've been importing a fairly large lump of emails into a test instance of the archive to see how well this would go. I picked a subset of my notmuch email database, all public emails sent to me via @lists.debian.org, giving me a set of around 216 000 emails to import. In the process, I had a look at the various attachments included in these emails, to figure out what to do with attachments, and noticed that one of the most common attachment formats do not have an official MIME type registered with IANA/IETF. The output from diff, ie the input for patch, is on the top 10 list of formats included in these emails. At the moment people seem to use either text/x-patch or text/x-diff, but neither is officially registered. It would be better if one official MIME type were registered and used everywhere.