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Debian Weekly News - October 20th, 1999



-------------------------------------------------------------------------- 
Debian Weekly News 
http://www.debian.org/News/weekly/current/issue/
Debian Weekly News - October 20th, 1999
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Welcome to Debian Weekly News, a newsletter for the Debian developer
community.

The Atlanta Linux Showcase was the event of the week. Here's a report
from Joey Hess:

  Debian was everywhere at the Atlanta Linux Showcase, from the two
  Debian books on the show floor, to the Debian [8]boxed set being
  handed out at VA's booth, to frisbees and rub-on tatoos emblazoned
  with the Debian logo. Of course, Debian had a booth there as well,
  with a webcam and examples of Debian running on hardware ranging
  from a NeXT box to Sparcs. The boxed set and other merchandising of
  Debian generated a lot of interest in us. The developers attending
  included some real old-timers, and we had some very good late night
  talks.
  
Zephaniah "Mercury" Hull [9]won the NeXT from Novare for successfully
getting Linux to run on the box, and pictures from ALS [10]are
available.

Some concerns [11]were raised about the size of boot floppies for
potato. Apparently, the base tarball for installation is some 15MB.
The boot floppies team is working hard on making sure that, for most
people, it will not be necessary to make 16 floppies for a potato
install.

Along similar lines, there are [12]complaints that very large data
packages should not be placed in the archive. A 47MB package
(gmt-coast-full) was recently uploaded. The Debian archive is
currently about 10G, and growing rapidly. There are worries that we
will lose many mirrors if it continues to grow at its current rate.

A new version of dpkg [13]was uploaded by our fearless leader, which
includes fixes from Ben Collins for some long-standing bugs.

Several packages were renamed this week, causing some confusion. The
lesstif package has been [14]renamed to lesstif1. The qt1/qt2 packages
have been [15]renamed to libqt1/libqt2. The bzip2 package has been
[16]split into bzip2 and libbz2. Some packages are still broken
because of these changes.

A new finger interface to the developers' directory was [17]announced.
This will mostly be useful for obtaining developers' GPG/PGP keys.
finger help@db.debian.org for usage instructions.

Some interesting proposals this week:
  * Wichert Akkerman [18]posted a proposal for handling new maintainer
    applications;
  * Matt Porter [19]suggested replacing dselect with console-apt on
    the boot floppies. The general consensus seems to be that while
    console-apt is really cool, it still lacks some important features
    before it will be really useful.
    
New packages in Debian this week include the following and [20]130
more:
  * [21]bottlerocket: Utility to control X10 Firecracker devices
  * [22]gnumach: The GNU version of the Mach microkernel ([23]dev)
  * [24]hurd: The GNU Hurd ([25]dev)
  * [26]libvdkbuilder: Pluggin libraries bundled with VDKBuilder (4
    days new) ([27]dev)
    
This issue of DWN was put together by Randolph Chung. Joey Hess will
be back next week.
  _________________________________________________________________

References
8. http://master.debian.org/~doogie/als/pics/debian-commercial-box.jpg
9. http://lwn.net/1999/features/ALS/
10. http://master.debian.org/~doogie/als/pics/
11. http://www.debian.org/Lists-Archives/debian-devel-9910/msg00844.html
12. http://www.debian.org/Lists-Archives/debian-devel-9910/msg01162.html
13. http://www.debian.org/Lists-Archives/debian-devel-9910/msg00852.html
14. http://www.debian.org/Lists-Archives/debian-devel-9910/msg01038.html
15. http://www.debian.org/Lists-Archives/debian-devel-9910/msg01139.html
16. http://www.debian.org/Lists-Archives/debian-devel-9910/msg01065.html
17. http://www.debian.org/Lists-Archives/debian-devel-9910/msg01120.html
18. http://www.debian.org/Lists-Archives/debian-project-9910/msg00003.html
19. http://www.debian.org/Lists-Archives/debian-boot-9910/msg00431.html
20. http://master.debian.org/~tausq/newpkgs-19991018.html
21. http://www.debian.org/Packages/unstable/electronics/bottlerocket.html
22. http://www.debian.org/Packages/unstable/base/gnumach.html
23. http://www.debian.org/Packages/unstable/devel/gnumach-dev.html
24. http://www.debian.org/Packages/unstable/base/hurd.html
25. http://www.debian.org/Packages/unstable/devel/hurd-dev.html
26. http://www.debian.org/Packages/unstable/libs/libvdkbuilder.html
27. http://www.debian.org/Packages/unstable/devel/libvdkbuilder-dev.html

-- 
see shy jo


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