Debian Weekly News - 5 to 11 Jan 1999
[ Also available on the web at http://www.debian.org/~joeyh/weeklynews/ ]
Debian Weekly News - 5 to 11 Jan 1999
Welcome to the second edition Debian Weekly News, a newsletter for the
Debian developer community.
It turns out there was a [1]bug in the program that generates the
[2]release-critical bug report. Some bugs that were not release
critical were being included. So in fact we have less than 40 release
critical bugs left now. Brian White [3]plans to put slink into deep
freeze and chose a release date soon. In the ensuing discussion,
someone brought up the old libc6 versioning problem - Paul Crowley
posted an [4]excellent summary of the problem and our options.
There's been some discussion this week about whether we can just
release Debian i386 when it's ready, if Debian m68k or other mature
ports aren't ready for release yet. On the one hand, this lets us
release i386 as soon as possible; on the other hand, this makes some
of the porters feel like their architectures are [5]second class
citizens.
Jay Treacy introduced a new [6]package search system on the web pages
based on DFSG free software, swish++. According to Jay, "It is very
simple, but well thought out." Sadly, Debian itself continues to use
non-free software elsewhere. We use qmail on lists.debian.org, to
handle the huge mail demands of the Debian lists, and we use pgp for
package signing. I hope this will change one day..
Vincent Renardias [7]suggested replacing fdisk with cfdisk, since
fdisk now has no upstream maintainer. However, cfdisk is missing some
important troubleshooting options, and lacks some useful fdisk
features. Some people suggested sfdisk as a better candidate for fdisk
replacement.
The CD group is ready for [8]more testing of their [9]scripts. If you
have the ability, burn some CD's to test them. And once you have some
slink CD's, why not try installing slink? Adam Di Carlo is working on
the Installation Manual for slink. He posted a [10]request for help
and the current progress is available [11]online. If you are planning
on doing an installation soon, be sure to print these up and give him
some comments.
The Hurd port is making progress; a minimal Debian GNU/Hurd system is
now [12]available. This marks an important point in the hurd port's
bootstrapping progress; packages can now be built directly on the
hurd. Also on the hurd mailing list there hes been some [13]talk about
whether the GRUB boot loader is suitable for debian to use instead of
LILO as its default boot loader.
Ben Collins posted a [14]small patch to dpkg-source that implements
the much-requested Source-Depends feature.
Bruce Perens is going to [15]donate a [16]huge quantity of US map data
to Debian and other free software groups in an effort to spur the
development of free mapping applications.
Marc Haber asked why Debian uses the .deb package format instead of
.rpm. See my [17]package format comparison page for some answers to
this common question.
Finally, Karl B. Hammar deserves a plug for his [18]lilo.conf file.
Well documented config files should be a goal for every part of
Debian.
Interesting package releases this week include:
* A [19]rewritten and largely redesigned devscripts, that fixes all
known bugs. Be sure to use version 2.0.3 or above; earlier
versions had /tmp races.
* A new version of [20]suidmanager that fixes the
debhelper/suidmanager incompatibility problem ("04755 not equal
to 4755") that has plagued us for the past month.
* Unofficial KDE 1.1pre .deb packages are [21]available.
Packages in trouble this week:
* Do not try to upgrade to libpng version 1.0.2 -- it is
[22]somewhat broken.
* The xcompat package will probably be [23]moved to
project/orphaned, since it is an a.out package that can no longer
be built on a Debian system.
Server news this week:
* ftp.debian.org is being [24]replaced with a new server which
should be in place soon.
* non-us.debian.org may be fixed, but no-one knows for sure.
Followups to news items from last week:
* Ben Collins made a [25]formal proposal about making packages log
install-time information via a dpkg-logger utility. Discussion
continues.
* RMS is not the only person having difficulty installing Debian on
his toshiba laptop. The long times between Debian releases mean
that packages such as pcmcia in stable are often [26]so outdated
they will not work on the latest and greatest laptops, forcing
people to figure out how to get updated packages from unstable.
Response to the [27]previous issue was overwhelmingly positive,
including mentions in [28]Freshmeat and [29]Linux Weekly News. Thank
you all. I do have some corrections to make:
* RMS has really been using Debian for years. His recent activity on
the lists is new, though.
* Martin Schulze's name was misspelled, my apologies.
* The next release of Debian will be version 2.1, not 2.2.
Debian weekly news now has several contributors to help me sift
through the lists for items of note. Thanks to Josip Rodin, Brandon
Mitchell, Robert de Forest, Aaron Van Couwenberghe, and Rob Tillotson
for their help.
_________________________________________________________________
To receive this newsletter weekly in your mailbox, [30]subscribe to
the debian-devel-announce mailing list.
_________________________________________________________________
Copyright © 1999 by [31]Joey Hess
This newsletter is free software; you can redistribute it and/or
modify it under the terms of the [32]GNU General Public License as
published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2, or (at
your option) any later version.
References
1. http://www.debian.org/Lists-Archives/debian-devel-announce-9901/msg00005.html
2. http://master.debian.org/~wakkerma/report.html
3. http://www.debian.org/Lists-Archives/debian-testing-9901/msg00034.html
4. http://www.debian.org/Lists-Archives/debian-testing-9901/msg00057.html
5. http://www.debian.org/Lists-Archives/debian-devel-9901/msg00271.html
6. http://www.debian.org/Lists-Archives/debian-www-9901/msg00005.html
7. http://www.debian.org/Lists-Archives/debian-devel-9901/msg00436.html
8. http://www.debian.org/Lists-Archives/debian-testing-9901/msg00031.html
9. http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~stevem/DebianCD/
10. http://www.debian.org/Lists-Archives/debian-testing-9901/msg00042.html
11. http://www.debian.org/~aph/boot-floppies/i386
12. http://www.debian.org/Lists-Archives/debian-hurd-9901/msg00023.html
13. http://www.debian.org/Lists-Archives/debian-hurd-9901/msg00016.html
14. file://localhost/home/joey/doc/weeklynews2.sourcedeps.html
15. http://slashdot.org/articles/99/01/06/1630245.shtml
16. http://www.census.gov/ftp/pub/geo/www/tiger/
17. http://kitenet.net/~joey/pkgcomp.html
18. http://www.debian.org/Lists-Archives/debian-testing-9901/msg00080.html
19. http://www.debian.org/Lists-Archives/debian-devel-9901/msg00399.html
20. http://www.debian.org/Lists-Archives/debian-devel-changes-9901/msg00617.html
21. ftp://ftp.timsnet.com/pub/kde/pre1.1/19990103/
22. http://www.debian.org/Lists-Archives/debian-devel-9901/msg00342.html
23. http://www.debian.org/Lists-Archives/debian-devel-9901/msg00356.html
24. http://www.debian.org/Lists-Archives/debian-testing-9901/msg00096.html
25. http://www.debian.org/Lists-Archives/debian-devel-9901/msg00430.html
26. http://www.debian.org/Lists-Archives/debian-devel-9901/msg00410.html
27. http://www.debian.org/~joeyh/weeklynews/weeklynews1.html
28. http://freshmeat.net/
29. http://www.lwn.net/
30. http://www.debian.org/MailingLists/subscribe
31. mailto:joeyh@debian.org
32. http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html
--
see shy jo
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