Debian Weekly News - December 16th, 2003
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Debian Weekly News
http://www.debian.org/News/weekly/2003/50/
Debian Weekly News - December 16th, 2003
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Welcome to this year's 50th issue of DWN, the weekly newsletter for
the Debian community. Finally, the website [1]CVS repository was
[2]resurrected, but the website can still not be updated. Chris Halls
[3]announced that he and René Engelhard have verified all recent
changes in the OpenOffice.org CVS repository. Christoph Berg
[4]proposed to call the experimental distribution "scud", which is
the name of Sid's dog that broke toys even worse than Sid did.
1. http://cvs.debian.org/webwml/?cvsroot=webwml
2. http://lists.debian.org/debian-www-0312/msg00111.html
3. http://lists.debian.org/debian-openoffice-0312/msg00097.html
4. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-0312/msg01291.html
New Features in APT-RPM. Joey Hess [5]noticed an [6]article that
described features in apt-rpm that are not available with plain
apt-get. Some of them would be nice to have as well. The most
interesting feature is to install local files but automatically
satisfy the dependencies through network download if required.
5. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-0312/msg00132.html
6. http://lwn.net/Articles/60650/
Installer Status Report. Joey Hess [7]reported that there are so many
installation [8]reports that the developers have not managed to
follow up on them all as of yet. He added that the big focus for the
next beta release will be on ports and translations. A lot of work has
begun to port the [9]debian-installer to more architectures, but most
of these are nowhere near working.
7. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce-0312/msg00005.html
8. http://bugs.debian.org/installation-reports
9. http://www.debian.org/devel/debian-installer/
Public X Strike Force Repositories. Branden Robinson [10]announced the
availability of anonymous, read-only, public access to the X Strike
Force [11]Subversion repositories via the Subversion protocol. Write
access is restricted to people with SSH access to the host. Branches
include XFree86 4.1.0, 4.2.1 and 4.3.0.
10. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce-0312/msg00006.html
11. http://necrotic.deadbeast.net/~branden/svn_pres/top.html
XFS Support in Debian Installer? Gunnar Wolf [12]wondered if the
[13]debian-installer should [14]support XFS since it will be
[15]included into future releases of Linux 2.4. Joey Hess [16]added
that once the stock Debian kernel contains XFS, support can trivially
be added to the debian-installer.
12. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-0312/msg01077.html
13. http://www.debian.org/devel/debian-installer/
14. http://bugs.debian.org/221132
15. http://kerneltrap.org/node/view/1751
16. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-0312/msg01114.html
Daily Debian-Installer Builds. Martin Sjögren [17]announced that he
has restarted [18]daily builds of the [19]debian-installer for the x86
architecture. Older builds were removed because he didn't have time to
verify their integrity.
17. http://lists.debian.org/debian-boot-0312/msg00581.html
18. http://people.debian.org/~sjogren/d-i/images/
19. http://www.debian.org/devel/debian-installer/
New Debian Stable Update CDs. After Ingo Saitz [20]noticed that the
[21]update CD was broken, Steve McIntyre [22]created new images and
jigdo files that should be available in the usual places soon. He
added a README file that explains why there have been two image files
with the same name.
20. http://lists.debian.org/debian-cd-0312/msg00080.html
21. http://non-us.cdimage.debian.org/jigdo-area/3.0_r1/jigdo/i386/debian-update-3.0r1-i386.jigdo
22. http://lists.debian.org/debian-cd-0312/msg00085.html
Dependencies to lower Priorities? Marc Haber [23]asked if it should be
allowed for packages to depend on others with lower priorities. Not
allowing this makes CD creation easier, but modern tools can follow
the dependencies on their own. Bastian Blank [24]explained that
parsing the entire Packages files during the basic installation would
require at least 6 MB additional memory.
23. http://lists.debian.org/debian-policy-0312/msg00020.html
24. http://lists.debian.org/debian-policy-0312/msg00037.html
Debian AMD64 FAQ. Bart Trojanowski [25]pointed out the [26]Wiki
resource on this port and mentioned the [27]FAQ that some people build
there. Additionally the developers have [28]discussed how to implement
the mixture of 32-bit and 64-bit libraries.
25. http://lists.debian.org/debian-amd64-0312/msg00012.html
26. http://wiki.debian.net/index.cgi?debian-amd64
27. http://wiki.debian.net/index.cgi?debian-amd64-faq
28. http://lists.debian.org/debian-amd64-0312/msg00017.html
Naming the BSD Ports. Joel Baker [29]reported that he was approached
by a member of the NetBSD team, who expressed that "Debian
GNU/KNetBSD" is a better name for the port than "Debian GNU/NetBSD".
Robert Millan [30]pointed out that a lot programs are using uname for
system identification when they're primarily checking for libc
features. Hence, the name needs to be selected carefully. Joel added
the final [31]naming scheme later.
29. http://lists.debian.org/debian-bsd-0312/msg00053.html
30. http://lists.debian.org/debian-bsd-0312/msg00081.html
31. http://lists.debian.org/debian-bsd-0312/msg00098.html
Writing Copyright Files. Peter Palfrader discovered several badly
written copyright files by new maintainers and many by old
maintainers. They lack information about the copyright owner, the
particular license and does not say that the software is licensed
under a particular license. He then wrote a [32]guideline on how to
properly phrase a copyright file that contains all required
information. Developers should also read Andrew Suffield's [33]mail on
what you should do when writing a copyright file.
32. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce-0312/msg00007.html
33. http://lists.debian.org/debian-legal-0312/msg00194.html
Debian Spain founded. Javier Fernández-Sanguino Peña [34]reported that
a legal Spanish Debian organisation has been founded during
[35]DebConf-ES by more than 20 people. The organization still needs to
be approved by the Spanish Internal Affairs Ministry, though. Once
this is done it could also be a way to collect donations for the
Debian project in Spain, to defend the Debian trademark and to
register the debian.es domain.
34. http://lists.debian.org/debian-project-0312/msg00044.html
35. http://www.hispalinux.es/~amaya/debconf-es/
Collaboration between Debian and KDE Developers. Several Debian and
KDE developers [36]announced a strategic proposal for closer
collaboration between [37]UserLinux and [38]KDE projects. The
[39]strategy consists of KDE core enterprise enhancements, UserLinux
installer and system tools, FreeDesktop.org and GNOME/GTK+ integration
and OpenOffice.org and Mozilla integration.
36. http://desktop.kdenews.org/strategy.html
37. http://www.userlinux.com/
38. http://www.kde.org/
39. http://www.newsforge.com/article.pl?sid=03/12/15/1621255
Using tmpfs as default? Masanori Goto [40]proposed to use tmpfs from
Linux 2.4 in the default sarge installation which was [41]discussed
long ago already. Roger Leigh [42]added that a size limit should be
added since it is much nicer to get ENOSPC than a kernel panic.
40. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-0312/msg01149.html
41. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-0111/msg00706.html
42. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-0312/msg01155.html
Providing a graphical WWW Browser. René Engelhard [43]suggested using
the virtual package x-www-browser for all graphical web browsers. Then
other packages could suggest or recommend a graphical browser while
the user can select one among them. He would also like to add this one
to the list of [44]virtual packages.
43. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-0312/msg01165.html
44. http://www.debian.org/doc/packaging-manuals/virtual-package-names-list.txt
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 [45]contributing
page to find out how to help. We're looking forward to receiving your
mail at [46]dwn@debian.org.
45. http://www.debian.org/News/weekly/contributing
46. mailto:dwn@debian.org
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