Debian Weekly News - 26 Jan to 1 Feb 1999
[ Also available at http://www.debian.org/News/weekly/1999/5/ ]
Debian Weekly News - 26 Jan to 1 Feb 1999
Welcome to the fifth edition of Debian Weekly News, a newsletter for
the Debian developer community. Debian Weekly News has been in
publication for a month now. How are we doing? [8]Write to the editor
and let us know what parts of the newsletter you like best, and what
needs improvement.
Attention all developers: [9]Elections for Debian project leader close
on the 3rd; hurry up and vote if you haven't already. Just don't
[10]vote like Netgod.
The [11]gimp contest for new Debian logos [12]has begun. It will run
for one month, then a [13]5 person logo team will weed out the best
logos for the rest of Debian to vote on. "The winner will be awarded
an email-address at debian.org, a CD-set with Debian GNU/Linux 2.1 for
the architectures of his/her choice (alpha, i386, m68k, or sparc) and
ever-lasting fame for creating the one and only Debian logo-set."
Development of dpkg will soon begin again. Ian Jackson says he plans
to get to work on it once he's no longer project leader. Guy Maor
[14]intends to do some work on it, and long MIA Klee Dienes has
[15]re-surfaced and is looking for some dpkg coding tasks to work on
too. Guy has already implemented a [16]nice new feature: When a new
experimental dpkg-dev package is used, dinstall (the program that
installs packages onto the ftp site) can now announce package uploads
to the correct list, and close bugs fixed by those uploads.
There have been suggestions to clean up dselect's access methods. One
[17]suggestion is to take out harddisk, mounted, cdrom, and nfs;
either removing them entirely or splitting them into a separate
package. This would prevent some of the confusion newbies experience
when they first use dselect, at least until they get to the package
selection part.
Of course, the ultimate end to dselect confusion is apt; and
gnome-apt, the GUI front end to apt, has finally been [18]released as
a .deb. "Who says package management can't be Sexy?". It's available
[19]here.
The long awaited X packages have been [20]released to frozen, and they
sport the longest Debian changelog entry ever, weighing in at an
impressive 189 lines. (This has been [21]verified by a scan of the
entire distribution.) In other X news, Stephen Crowley [22]plans to
package RedHat's Xconfigurator as part of Debian.
A [23]draft chapter of the O'Reilly book [24]Open Sources mentions
Debian in several places. The chapter is written by Bruce Perens and
describes the Open Source Definition. "the Debian Free Software
Guidelines were the right document to define Open Source"
Darren Benham is [25]searching for new software for list archiving.
Hopefully, it will support pgp/MIME signatures, and it must be
DFSG-free. Among other problems, the current list archiving software
used on the Debian web site [26]has a Y2K problem. And speaking of
Debian and Y2K, we now have a [27]Y2K web page.
And last but not least, the longest thread on the lists this week was
a [28]frustrating dialog with the author of libtool about its use of
-rpath. Many developers agree this is a bad idea for linux systems;
the libtool author disagrees. After arguing in circles for days, we
haven't quite reached a resolution, but a hack of ld.so is looking
likely instead of a change to libtool.
Help wanted:
* If you notice your cron running jobs at the wrong time of day, you
can help the maintainer track down the cause of this problem by
doing a little [29]experiment.
* Several applications linked statically to gettext need to be
[30]recompiled. There's a security hole involved. If you maintain
a package that uses gettext, check it out.
* Work on [31]lsh, the free ssh clone is progressing, but help is
still needed. Non-US developers are [32]asked to participate,
since they are able to hack on crypto code, but those from the US
can still contribute by other means.
Followups to previous news items:
* The Zope license has been [33]changed and is now DFSG free.
_________________________________________________________________
To receive this newsletter weekly in your mailbox, [34]subscribe to
the debian-devel-announce mailing list.
[35]Back issues of this newsletter are available.
Debian weekly news is edited by [36]Joey Hess.
_________________________________________________________________
References
8. mailto:joeyh@debian.org
9. http://www.debian.org/vote/1999/vote_0001
10. http://www.debian.org/News/weekly/1999/5/mail#1
11. http://contest.gimp.org/
12. http://www.debian.org/News/weekly/1999/5/mail#2
13. http://www.debian.org/News/weekly/1999/5/mail#3
14. http://www.debian.org/Lists-Archives/debian-dpkg-9901/msg00149.html
15. http://www.debian.org/Lists-Archives/debian-dpkg-9901/msg00162.html
16. http://www.debian.org/Lists-Archives/debian-devel-9901/msg02650.html
17. http://www.debian.org/Lists-Archives/debian-testing-9901/msg00217.html
18. http://www.debian.org/Lists-Archives/debian-devel-9901/msg02402.html
19. http://www.debian.org/~hp/gnome-apt.html
20. http://www.debian.org/Lists-Archives/debian-devel-changes-9901/msg02183.html
21. http://www.debian.org/Lists-Archives/debian-devel-9901/msg02490.html
22. http://www.debian.org/Lists-Archives/debian-devel-9901/msg02195.html
23. http://www.hams.com/OSD.html
24. http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/opensources/
25. http://www.debian.org/Lists-Archives/debian-www-9901/msg00064.html
26. http://www.debian.org/News/weekly/1999/5/mail#4
27. http://master.debian.org/~csmall/y2k.html
28. http://www.debian.org/Lists-Archives/debian-devel-9901/msg02245.html
29. http://www.debian.org/Lists-Archives/debian-devel-9901/msg02311.html
30. http://bugs.debian.org/28850
31. http://www.net.lut.ac.uk/psst/
32. http://www.debian.org/Lists-Archives/debian-devel-9901/msg02030.html
33. http://www.zope.com/News?query_start=1
34. http://www.debian.org/MailingLists/subscribe
35. http://www.debian.org/News/weekly/
36. mailto:joeyh@debian.org
--
see shy jo
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