Debian Weekly News - November 4th, 2003
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Debian Weekly News
http://www.debian.org/News/weekly/2003/44/
Debian Weekly News - November 4th, 2003
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Welcome to this year's 44th issue of DWN, the weekly newsletter for
the Debian community. Bruce Perens [1]reserved nonfree.org as a
possible home for non-free if it ever spins off of Debian. Currently
it's just a CNAME to ftp.debian.org but with a little work it could be
a good facility to manage a non-free cut-over.
1. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-0310/msg02212.html
Debian faster than Gentoo? Matt Garman [2]wondered why his C++
program ran dramatically slower when compiled on a Gentoo machine than
when compiled with Debian Sid. He later [3]reported that recompiling
the Gentoo C++ libraries with less aggressive optimization flags (-O2
instead of -O3) eliminated the speed difference. Matt also [4]added
that Debian and other distributions are conservative, but set up by
very experienced people.
2. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.linux.gentoo.user/50924
3. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.linux.gentoo.user/50973
4. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.linux.gentoo.user/50953
System Recovery with Knoppix. IBM Developerworks has an [5]article by
Carla Schroder that describes how to rescue a non-booting Linux
system, edit files, mount networked filesystems, and do a bare-metal
rebuild with only a [6]Knoppix disk and an Internet connection.
5. http://www-106.ibm.com/developerworks/linux/library/l-knopx.html
6. http://www.knopper.net/knoppix/
Improving KDE Maintainership. Some people may have been alarmed to see
that many of the core KDE packages were orphaned last week by Chris
Cheney. Fortunately, this was done to pave the way for the Qt/KDE
Maintainers group of which Chris Cheney is a member. A [7]mailing
list for this group was created and a draft [8]policy document is
being discussed.
7. http://lists.debian.org/debian-qt-kde/
8. http://people.debian.org/~madkiss/debian-kde-policy.html
Amendment of the Social Contract. Branden Robinson [9]proposed to
amend the [10]Social Contract. Some of his [11]amendments change the
meaning of the Social Contract, whereas others are only editorial. One
of his key proposals is that Debian's commitment to a non-free archive
be deleted. This means that Debian would be free to stop providing
non-free software if it chose. The proposal was [12]discussed on
Slashdot, where Bruce Perens [13]suggested [14]how removing non-free
might work. The proposal would also make the Social Contract a bit
separate from the Debian Free Software Guidelines.
9. http://lists.debian.org/debian-vote-0310/msg00106.html
10. http://www.debian.org/social_contract
11. http://www.xs4all.nl/~dark/draft-sc-amendment-20031030.html
12. http://developers.slashdot.org/developers/03/10/30/1618243.shtml?tid=185&tid=90
13. http://developers.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=84151&cid=7352420
14. http://developers.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=84151&cid=7352723
Debian in the Enterprise? James Maguire [15]wondered if there is a
place for Debian in the enterprise world. He talks about certification
or rather the lack of and missing vendor support which is compensated
by third party support from different companies. Use of Debian depends
on the requirements of the end user. If they were technically self
supporting, and they don't want to pay a different vendor, they could
deploy Debian -- and it would lead to greater return on investment.
15. http://www.newsfactor.com/perl/story/22602.html
Draft Position Statement regarding GNU FDL. Manoj Srivastava
[16]reported about the effort writing a document that attempts to
address some concerns that members of the Debian project have about
the GNU [17]Free Documentation License (FDL). This [18]document
attempts to present the reasoning behind the conclusion that the GNU
FDL is not regarded as a license that can easily satisfy the
[19]Debian Free Software Guidelines.
16. http://lists.debian.org/debian-project-0310/msg00178.html
17. http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html
18. http://people.debian.org/~srivasta/Position_Statement.html
19. http://www.debian.org/social_contract#guidelines
Constitutional Amendment Results. Proposal A in the [20]vote to
disambiguate [21]Constitution section 4.1.5 [22]succeeded over the
other options. This means that the [23]Debian Social Contract and
[24]Debian Free Software Guidelines are now "Foundation Documents",
and may be modified by a 3:1 majority of Developers. The amendment
also clarified the status of non-technical documents, ensuring that
Developers may issue, supersede and withdraw various statements,
including position statements about issues of the day.
20. http://www.debian.org/vote/2003/vote_0003
21. http://www.debian.org/devel/constitution
22. http://lists.debian.org/debian-vote-0310/msg00114.html
23. http://www.debian.org/social_contract
24. http://www.debian.org/social_contract#guidelines
Debconf Templates Style Guide. Christian Perrier [25]announced a style
guide for writing debconf templates. During his work translating
debconf templates to French, Christian often found templates which
seemed to be inconsistent with some written or unwritten rules. It
became evident that some formalisation of writing rules and
recommendations could help package maintainers to prepare
"well-written" debconf templates. General style harmonisation could
also greatly improve the perception of Debian, giving it a more
"professional" presentation.
25. http://lists.debian.org/debian-boot-0310/msg01686.html
NetBSD Status Report. Joel Baker [26]posted a NetBSD status report.
Joel will be restarting the archive using debpool (which should handle
uploads via HTTPS PUT, without needing logins on the box itself). The
archive will be based on -current again (aka, pre-2.0), since he has
run into problems which can only be resolved by having working POSIX
Thread support. He is also continuing to work on the 4-to-3-clause BSD
license conversion, with the permission of the NetBSD Foundation
(contacting authors and asking them to relicense, submitting patches,
and working with the Core team to get them integrated cleanly). So
far, this has been dramatically successful.
26. http://lists.debian.org/debian-bsd-0310/msg00009.html
Getting HP Hardware supported for Debian. Kianusch Sayah Karadji is
[27]trying to convince [28]HP to add Debian support to their hardware.
HP claims, that since Debian has no figures on how many users it has
on HP servers, they do not know if supporting Debian would make sense.
If you do, please get in touch with Kianusch at
[29]debian@sk-tech.net. Several HP employees [30]are members of the
Debian development community.
27. http://lists.debian.org/debian-user-0310/msg06517.html
28. http://www.hp.com/
29. mailto:debian@sk-tech.net
30. http://www.opensource.hp.com/opensource_projects.html
Tasksel and custom Debian Distributions. Andreas Tille [31]wondered
how tasksel is supposed to support custom Debian distributions such as
[32]Debian Jr. or [33]Debian-Med. Currently tasksel displays the
debian-jr task but ignores the others. Of course, a more sophisticated
solution should be found to handle them equally.
31. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-0310/msg02048.html
32. http://www.debian.org/devel/debian-jr/
33. http://www.debian.org/devel/debian-med/
Multiple PostgreSQL Packages. Oliver Elphick [34]pondered whether and
how to have multiple versions of the PostgreSQL packages [35]installed
at once. This is to get round problems with upgrading major versions,
and to allow people to have multiple database clusters, possibly at
different software versions.
34. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-0310/msg02058.html
35. http://cvs.alioth.debian.org/cgi-bin/cvsweb.cgi/common/postgresql-client.html?cvsroot=pkg-postgresql
Debian Project at COMDEX. There'll be a Debian [36]installation
festival at this year's [37]Comdex in Las Vegas on Thursday, November
20th, from 12:00pm to 1:30pm. Everybody is welcome to help or be
helped. Also at Comdex, in the "Open Source and Linux Innovation
Center", on Tuesday 18th from 1:30pm to 2:00pm a half hour talk
introduces Debian to corporate users and, in the Open Source
conference track, on Wednesday 19th from 3:30pm to 4:45pm a
[38]discussion panel titled "A Practical Guide to Open Source
Operating Systems" will include Debian.
36. http://www.comdex.com/lasvegas2003/exhib/index.php?s=ic_open_spkr
37. http://www.comdex.com/lasvegas2003/
38. http://education.key3media.com:8080/comdex/lv2003/education/FMPro?-DB=K3Sessions.fp5&-lay=webform&-format=session_detail.html&Session_ID=3733&-Find
Alternative Postscript- and PDF-Viewer. Matthias Urlichs [39]noticed
that there are virtual packages for postscript-viewer and pdf-viewer,
but no alternatives, i.e. there's no /usr/bin/postscript-viewer. Mark
Brown [40]explained that Debian uses a MIME handler registration
system which viewer programs should be making use of. The run-mailcap
program can be used to find an appropriate program for a given MIME
type.
39. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-0310/msg02091.html
40. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-0310/msg02109.html
Localised Bug Reports. Magosányi Arpád [41]wondered if there is a
known or planned way to report bugs to the Debian Bug Tracking System
in a non-english language. He proposed that if a non-english language
is detected, the bug report is sent to a language package instead the
real package. The maintainers of the language package would then
mediate the communication between the user and the package maintainer.
41. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-0310/msg02141.html
Request for a Debian Kernels List. Francesco Paolo Lovergine
[42]proposed to create a new mailing list debian-kernels in order to
ease the coordination and maintenance of kernels and patches in
Debian. This list would not be limited to Linux kernels but also
include Hurd and *BSD. He also [43]requested the list to be created.
42. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-0310/msg02173.html
43. http://bugs.debian.org/218923
Circular Build Dependencies. Anthony DeRobertis [44]wondered if he is
the only one who believed that one could build Debian from source,
starting with only essential and build-essential packages. In
particular he stomped over the cdbs - libgd-gd2-*-perl - cdbs chain.
Joel Baker would [45]like to see Debian main in stable and testing as
closed sets in terms of build-dependencies. The current situation is a
pain for porters to a new architecture or kernel.
44. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-0310/msg02223.html
45. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-0311/msg00012.html
Split Kernel Header Files. Otto Wyss [46]wondered why [47]libc6-dev
suddenly depended on [48]linux-kernel-headers. Mark Brown
[49]explained that there have always been some kernel headers included
in libc6-dev. They have just been split out into a separate package
now. Several of these headers are referenced by headers provided by
glibc which would break those headers if linux-kernel-headers is not
installed.
46. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-0311/msg00033.html
47. http://packages.debian.org/libc6-dev
48. http://packages.debian.org/linux-kernel-headers
49. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-0311/msg00037.html
Security Updates. You know the drill. Please make sure that you update
your systems if you have any of these packages installed.
* [50]thttpd -- Information leak, DoS and arbitrary code execution.
50. http://www.debian.org/security/2003/dsa-396
New or Noteworthy Packages. The following packages were added to the
unstable Debian archive recently or contain important updates.
* [51]apache-utils -- Utility programs for webservers.
* [52]bookmark-merge -- Merge bookmarks from Mozilla, Netscape and
IE.
* [53]crosshurd -- Install a hurd-i386 system from any running
Debian system.
* [54]debian-installer-demo -- Debian Installer demo.
* [55]gnue-appserver -- GNU Enterprise Application Server.
* [56]gnue-navigator -- GNU Enterprise Navigator.
* [57]gridlock -- Collection of grid-based board games for GNUstep.
* [58]gtklookat -- VRML viewer for GTK+.
* [59]gtodo -- GTK-2 todo list.
* [60]ps2eps -- Convert PostScript to EPS (Encapsulated PostScript)
files.
* [61]udo -- Universal DOcument - text processing utility.
* [62]wavesurfer -- Sound Manipulation Program.
51. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/web/apache-utils.html
52. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/utils/bookmark-merge.html
53. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/misc/crosshurd.html
54. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/devel/debian-installer-demo.html
55. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/interpreters/gnue-appserver.html
56. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/interpreters/gnue-navigator.html
57. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/games/gridlock.html
58. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/libs/gtklookat.html
59. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/x11/gtodo.html
60. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/text/ps2eps.html
61. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/text/udo.html
62. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/sound/wavesurfer.html
Orphaned Packages. 9 packages were orphaned this week and require a
new maintainer. This makes a total of 190 orphaned packages. Many
thanks to the previous maintainers who contributed to the Free
Software community. Please see the [63]WNPP pages for the full list,
and please add a note to the bug report and retitle it to ITA: if you
plan to take over a package.
63. http://www.debian.org/devel/wnpp/
* [64]findimagedupes -- Finds visually similar or duplicate images.
([65]Bug#218699)
* [66]gfpoken -- Recreate a grid of mirrors from clues given by
tests. ([67]Bug#219061)
* [68]glotski -- Slide the blocks to reach a goal. ([69]Bug#219062)
* [70]lwm -- Lightweight Window Manager. ([71]Bug#219063)
* [72]overkill -- Bloody 2D action deathmatch-like game in
ASCII-art. ([73]Bug#218157)
* [74]pong -- Preference/Property dialogs maker for GNOME.
([75]Bug#218462)
* [76]sourcenav -- Source code analysis, editor, browser and build
tool. ([77]Bug#218158)
* [78]tuxeyes -- Fancy version of xeyes. ([79]Bug#219065)
* [80]typespeed -- Zap words flying across the screen by typing them
correctly. ([81]Bug#219064)
64. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/graphics/findimagedupes.html
65. http://bugs.debian.org/218699
66. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/games/gfpoken.html
67. http://bugs.debian.org/219061
68. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/gnome/glotski.html
69. http://bugs.debian.org/219062
70. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/x11/lwm.html
71. http://bugs.debian.org/219063
72. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/games/overkill.html
73. http://bugs.debian.org/218157
74. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/gnome/pong.html
75. http://bugs.debian.org/218462
76. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/devel/sourcenav.html
77. http://bugs.debian.org/218158
78. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/x11/tuxeyes.html
79. http://bugs.debian.org/219065
80. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/games/typespeed.html
81. http://bugs.debian.org/219064
Want to continue reading DWN? Please help us create this newsletter.
We still need more volunteer writers who watch the Debian community
and report about what is going on. Please see the [82]contributing
page to find out how to help. We're looking forward to receiving your
mail at [83]dwn@debian.org.
82. http://www.debian.org/News/weekly/contributing
83. mailto:dwn@debian.org
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