The news are collected on http://wiki.debian.org/DeveloperNews Feel free to contribute. Debian Enhancement Proposals ---------------------------- Lars Wirzenius, Stefano Zacchiroli and Adeodato Simó are trying to introduce the concept of Debian Enhancement Proposal[1]. Quoting dato's mail[2] that started the discussion, the goals of the proposal are twofold: 1. having clear indication of the status of ongoing proposals, particularly to settle that a certain design/implementation has been agreed upon, ensuring that time spent in that implementation will not by wasted, and dissipating "fears" of adopting such implementation (which should help to break the traditional "wide adoption vs normative documents" Debian loop) 2. having a central place/mechanism to document decisions and consensus reached in our traditional ways and forums, to which we can later refer to instead of "yeah, *that* mailing list thread" The proposal has received much support although there are still some debates on the technical means to store the DEP documents themselves. -- Raphael Hertzog [1] http://dep.debian.net [2] http://lists.debian.org/debian-project/2008/01/msg00045.html wnpp.debian.net --------------- http://wnpp.debian.net provides a nice overview page and RSS feeds about work needing packages and their statistics. -- Holger Levsen debcheckout ----------- Out of popular request, here is a long overdue announcement about debcheckout. Available since September 2007, debcheckout is a new devscript[3] performing version control system checkout of a given package. When given a package name on the command line, it parses the Vcs-XXX fields of the package and attempts to checkout the debianized source tree of the package using the needed version control system. It can also be used to just print out VCS information or to check out packages from plain URL. Usually `debcheckout packagename` is enough to get you started. Usually, Vcs URLs point to anonymous checkout, so you won't be able to commit on the checked out repository. However debcheckout recognizes some typical Debian URL schemes (for example for VCS hosted on alioth or launchpad) and, if requested by passing the `-a` (for authenticated) flag, will mangle the checkout URL so that you can commit on it. Of course this requires you to have the permissions to do so, but that's already true for all DDs on some repositories (for example collab-maint). See the `debcheckout (1)` manpage for additional information. -- Stefano Zacchiroli [3] http://packages.debian.org/devscripts Bits from DEHS -------------- It's been some time since DEHS[4] had some 'big' changes (probably since its creation). Here's a list of changes that have been done lately: New look&feel:: DEHS' website now has a look similar to other *.d.o pages. More restyling will be done at some point in the future :). DEHS statistics:: For some time now DEHS provides a statistics page[5] which shows the overall "external status" of Debian over the time. The big bumps shown were some changes/tweaks in the backend, not actually large changes in the archive. Updated uscan:: DEHS is now using, and will continue to use, the latest uscan version available. This will increase the quality of the checks by using the latest improvements of uscan. New upstream version notifications:: DEHS started sending notifications to the 'summary' tag/keyword of the PTS when it finds a new upstream version. Anyone interested in receiving this kind of notifications should read the PTS' documentation to find out how to subscribe[6]. Note that there are some packages shipping a watch file which reports an incorrect upstream version. I'm going to file reports on those I notice. Fresher data:: DEHS now refreshes its data daily (new/updated packages only) and several times a month (archive wide) meaning the data is fresher than ever. Some more work is being done so packages are checked even more often by making use of timestamps, reducing the workload and providing even fresher data at the same time. Hoping I didn't miss any other important change I invite anyone interested in joining DEHS' development or wanting to know more about it to contact me (I don't think Stefano will reject anyone willing to continue with his work). -- Raphael Geissert [4] http://dehs.alioth.debian.org [5] http://dehs.alioth.debian.org/stats.html [6] http://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/developers-reference/ch-resources.en.html#s-pkg-tracking-system PTS <-> DEHS integration ------------------------ A first implementation of DEHS <-> PTS integration is now available. On one hand if you are subscribed to the "summary" keyword of a given package you will receive mail from DEHS notifying the availability of a new upstream version, as detected by DEHS[7]. Kudos to Raphael Geissert for the work on the DEHS side. On the other hand at each PTS pulse, information about packages which have newer upstream version and about packages which failed an uscan run are gathered. Packages which a newer upstream will have a corresponding TODO item in the PTS page whereas packages with failed uscan run will have a corresponding item in the Problems section. -- Stefano Zacchiroli [7] http://dehs.alioth.debian.org Using wildcards in symbols files -------------------------------- Since dpkg-dev 1.14.16, dpkg-gensymbols supports a new syntax in the debian/*.symbols files to provide the same dependency information for all symbols from a given library version (example: *@GLIBC_2.0). It makes it easy to provide a symbols file for sane libraries using symbol versioning. Check dpkg-gensymbols' man page to learn more about this. -- Raphael Hertzog Dpkg feature removal schedule and API information ------------------------------------------------- Starting with dpkg 1.14.16, two files are provided under /usr/share/doc (README.feature-removal-schedule and README.api) which describe the timeline for features that are going to get removed and the status of the APIs provided by dpkg and dpkg-dev. Check them out online too: http://git.debian.org/?p=dpkg/dpkg.git;a=blob;f=README.feature-removal-schedule;hb=master http://git.debian.org/?p=dpkg/dpkg.git;a=blob;f=README.api;hb=master -- Guillem Jover -- Raphaël Hertzog Le best-seller français mis à jour pour Debian Etch : http://www.ouaza.com/livre/admin-debian/
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