Debian Weekly News - January 17th, 2001
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Debian Weekly News
http://www.debian.org/News/weekly/2001/3/
Debian Weekly News - January 17th, 2001
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Welcome to Debian Weekly News, a newsletter for the Debian community.
Today, the first Debian IA-64 system booted. Bdale Garbee and Randolph
Chung have been quietly working on a port of Debian to the IA-64 (also
known as "Itanium") for several weeks. They starting by building a
chrooted Debian system inside a Turbolinux installation, and working
from there to [1]today's accomplishment: a native Debian system
booting on IA-64. "Package uploads should begin within the next week."
Over 600 .debs have been built, and if they can get a version of the
boot-floppies working with IA-64, the new architecture could be
suitable for release with woody. Of course, IA-64 systems are not
available for sale yet, and general lack of root access to IA-64
machines (plus NDA issues) hobbled earlier porting efforts; this port
really took off when Bdale, a veteran Debian porter, received a loaner
IA-64 machine. Bdale is "*not* able to provide logins for everyone on
this machine". For more information on the IA-64 port, see its [2]web
page.
Is it finally time to move cryptographic software from non-US into the
main archive? Wichert Akkerman [3]proposed that it is time to do just
that. The crypto situation is still rather murky. The regulations
require that the software not be consciously exported to one of seven
blacklisted countries. What lengths we would have to go to to not run
afoul of that requirement is a question that can only really be
answered by a lawyer; however, no lawyers have yet stepped forward to
offer the Debian project a clear interpretation of the law. Other
sites and distributions, such as kernel.org, and Red Hat, seem to have
decided that it's safe to include crypto in their archive with only
minimal precautions like [4]this welcome message. There were no real
objections to Wichert's proposal, just a fair amount of uncertainty
and confusion, and the proposal is well on its way to becoming part of
policy.
61 long-orphaned packages are scheduled to be removed from Debian in
[5]three weeks time, in the theory that if no one is interested
enough to maintain them, and nothing in Debian depends on them, they
are not worth keeping in the distribution. Scan the list and make sure
you care about nothing therein..
The suidmanager package has been superseded by dpkg's new
dpkg-statoverride program. A transition plan has been developed.
[6]This message explains how to update packages that use suidmanager
to make use of statoverride.
Many stories of Debian users were posted to a [7]thread on
debian-user entitled "Why choose Debian?" There is nothing really new
here -- we know that many people start with more well-known linux
distributions, and once they are comfortable and experienced with
linux, gravitate toward Debian. The nice thing about this thread is
the stories: dozens of accounts of people's introduction to linux,
their experiences, and how they eventually stumbled upon Debian. These
stories are sure to resonate with your own experiences, and are
pleasant reading for a lazy afternoon.
This week's security fixes included a temporary file vulnerability in
[8]mgetty, and a reappearance of a [9]glibc bug that allowed normal
users to view files like /etc/shadow. This latter bug only affected
testing and unstable, so no formal advisory will be posted.
No week would be complete without a flamewar, and we had a great one
this week. It's another new-maintainer flamewar, centered around a
perceived slowness of the Debian Account Managar's approval of new
applicants, but it veered far and wide, encompassing a variety of
complaints about the new maintainer process. Debian Weekly News will
not attempt to summarize it.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
References
1. http://www.debian.org/News/weekly/2001/3/mail#2
2. http://www.debian.org/ports/ia64/
3. http://lists.debian.org/debian-policy-0101/msg00036.html
4. ftp://ftp.kernel.org/welcome.msg
5. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce-0101/msg00008.html
6. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce-0101/msg00004.html
7. http://lists.debian.org/debian-user-0101/thrd5.html#02044
8. http://www.debian.org/security/2001/dsa-011
9. http://www.debian.org/News/weekly/2001/3/mail#1
--
see shy jo
Reply to: