Debian Weekly News - August 3rd, 1999
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Debian Weekly News
http://www.debian.org/News/weekly/current/issue/
Debian Weekly News - August 3rd, 1999
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Debian Weekly News - August 3rd, 1999
Welcome to Debian Weekly News, a newsletter for the Debian developer
community. This is a combined two-week edition of Debian Weekly News.
Ian Jackson's [8]first reaction to the post of the DpkgV2 spec was
extreme: "One of the main reasons that dpkg is unapproachable by poor
to mediocre programmers is that it must perform a complex task with a
very high level of reliability". After some time to think it over
though, he [9]concluded that "it's probably a good thing for both my
dpkg and yours that both projects exist. Maybe we'll spur each other
on." And indeed, this week Ian [10]uploaded to experimental his first
release of dpkg in a very long time.
Yet another Debian book will soon be published: Debian Gnu/Linux 2.2
Unleashed. This brings the count of Debian books in English up to
three; Debian GNU/Linux; Guide to Installation and Usage is now
[11]for sale on Amazon.com, and The Debian Linux User's Guide has been
around for a while now. Of course the amusing and disturbing thing
about this newest title is it is [12]due to be published in September
and claims to include a Debian 2.2 CD. Will Debian 2.2 even be
released by then?
Josip Rodin has been working on the [13]release critical bug list. He
[14]mailed each maintainer with a release critical bug asking what
their plans are to deal with it. This had immediate results -- soon
after his mailing, the number of critical bugs [15]dropped drastically
(although 230 remain open).
In security news, samba has a number of security holes that have been
fixed in the [16]latest release.
Becoming a developer is taking increasingly long, to judge by tales of
woe like [17]this, and [18]this. People who are very motivated to work
on Debian have been stuck in the new-maintainer queue for months, and
have lately been looking for ways to contribute even though they
cannot upload packages. Raphael Hertzog has a [19]workaround for this
problem: registered developers could "sponsor" the work of a
non-developer, make sure it's okay and upload it. The idea is catching
on, though it doesn't address the real problem with the queue.
We lost a developer this week. Leon Breedt [20]resigned from the
project, citing several problems with Debian that we should take very
seriously.
On a brighter note, Debian is one of [21]two finalists for
LinuxWorld's editors choice award for "Distribution/Server". And the
Associated Press in Germany released [22]two news items about Debian.
Marc A. Volovic [23]updated his [24]Debian Alpha HOWTO. It's work in
progress but it's already a good source of information if you plan to
install Debian on an Alpha box.
We have [25]two weeks worth of Debian-JP news summaries. One thing
they mention is two new simplified Japanese Debian installs, [26]Dice
Linux and [27]Debimaru.
Unofficial .debs of XFree86 3.3.4 are available for testing. Branden
Robinson and Adam Heath put these together and made them available less
than 48 hours after the release of the upstream source files. So far,
there seem to be no significant issues for i386 users, but m68k is having
compile-time problems. Official XFree86 3.3.4 packages will be available
soon. In the meantime, the unofficial ones are available from [38]the X
Strike Force.
New packages added to Debian this week include the following and [28]8
more:
* [29]console-apt: Text-based user interface for APT
* [30]dhcp-dns: Dynamic DNS updates for DHCP
* [31]ext2resize: an ext2 filesystem resizer
* [32]fsviewer: FSViewer is a NeXT FileViewer lookalike for Window
Maker.
* [33]g5: gtk-based 5-in-a-row game
* [34]gcd: a GTK-based CD player
Followups to previous news items:
* Manoj's proposal for the /usr/share/doc transition received 4
objections and [35]died. Proposals abound on debian-policy; this
issue has been the main topic there for weeks. It will probably be
passed to the Technical Committee since a consensus seems elusive.
* The perl upgrade is [36]very nearly complete. Just a few packages
remain to be upgraded and they won't affect most people.
Thanks to Randolph Chung, Katsura S. Yoshio, and Christian Meder for
[37]contributing. Also, a special thanks to Jason Gunthorpe, Christoph
Lameter, and especially Sean Perry for making this edition of DWN
possible as I battled with DNS troubles, moving, and dead
motherboards.
_________________________________________________________________
References
8. http://www.debian.org/Lists-Archives/debian-devel-9907/msg01472.html
9. http://www.debian.org/Lists-Archives/debian-devel-9907/msg01773.html
10. http://www.debian.org/Lists-Archives/debian-devel-9907/msg01780.html
11. http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0735709149/10102519/002-9416152-4171441
12. http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0672317001/qid=933716997/sr=1-1/002-9416152-4171441
13. http://master.debian.org/~wakkerma/bugs/
14. http://www.debian.org/Lists-Archives/debian-dpkg-9907/msg00074.html
15. http://www.debian.org/Lists-Archives/debian-devel-9907/msg01703.html
16. http://www.debian.org/Lists-Archives/debian-security-announce-9907/msg00000.html
17. http://www.debian.org/Lists-Archives/debian-devel-9907/msg01269.html
18. http://www.debian.org/Lists-Archives/debian-devel-9907/msg01598.html
19. http://www.debian.org/Lists-Archives/debian-devel-9907/msg01530.html
20. http://www.debian.org/Lists-Archives/debian-devel-9907/msg02077.html
21. http://www.linuxworld.com/linuxworld/lw-1999-07/lw-07-finalists.html
22. http://www.debian.org/News/1999/19990727
23. http://www.debian.org/Lists-Archives/debian-alpha-9907/msg00151.html
24. http://www.bard.org.il/~marc/html/linux.phtml
25. http://www.debian.org/News/weekly/1999/29/mail#1
26. http://dice.debian.gr.jp/
27. http://llc.linet.gr.jp/~yochi/debimaru/
28. http://master.debian.org/~tausq/newpkgs.html
29. http://www.debian.org/Packages/unstable/admin/console-apt.html
30. http://www.debian.org/Packages/unstable/net/dhcp-dns.html
31. http://www.debian.org/Packages/unstable/admin/ext2resize.html
32. http://www.debian.org/Packages/unstable/x11/fsviewer.html
33. http://www.debian.org/Packages/unstable/games/g5.html
34. http://www.debian.org/Packages/unstable/sound/gcd.html
35. http://www.debian.org/Bugs/db/40/40706-b.html#m130
36. http://www.debian.org/Lists-Archives/debian-devel-announce-9907/msg00019.html
37. http://www.debian.org/News/weekly/contributing
38. http://www.debian.org/~branden/
--
see shy jo
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