Debian Weekly News - November 2nd, 1999
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Debian Weekly News
http://www.debian.org/News/weekly/current/issue/
Debian Weekly News - November 2nd, 1999
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Welcome to Debian Weekly News, a newsletter for the Debian developer
community.
The freeze has been postponed until November 7th. The Release Manager
was unable to coordinate the freeze this past weekend. The bugsquash
party did go ahead as planned, and around 75 [8]release critical bugs
were fixed in one day. Read Richard Braakman's [9]email for details
about how the freeze will work, including the new "Test Cycles"
process.
Build dependencies are being discussed again this week. A proposal
specifying how they will work has been accepted and should be in the
next version of policy, which is due out soon. Using that as a base,
Roman Hodek [10]posted a "vision for the future" of how build
dependancies can be used by different programs in the future. But
Julian Gilbey [11]points out that figuring out what a package really
depends on to build, to generate the build dependancies entry, can be
quite hard.
Ben Collins has made an experimental version of dpkg available, with
several [12]new features that have been wanted for a long time,
including internally signed packages, and bzip2 compression support.
Last week Debian Weekly News dropped the ball when we didn't mention a
copyright problem with apt and Corel's "get_it" apt frontend, which is
a Qt program. Since it was linked to the GPLed libapt, there was a
[13]licence conflict. Jason Gunthorpe and Corel quietly [14]resolved
this problem by changing apt's license to allow linking apt and Qt.
Linux Weekly News laster posted an interesting [15]editorial about
this. It seemed the issue was closed.
Then this week, Ian Jackson brought up [16]another issue: "lib-apt
isn't the only thing that is bound together at run-time with Qt in
this program. dpkg is too - the fact that the interface is program
call rather than dynamic linking is an irrelevant technical detail."
Ian isn't about to change dpkg's license, and he is presumably talking
with Corel about this in private. Meanwhile, this spawned a long,
murky thread on debian-legal, since the law is very unclear on this
and many people, including RMS and Bruce Perens, [17]disagree with
Ian's reasoning.
BIND is once more in main. A [18]patch from Paul Vixie allows easy
removal of the non-free DNNSEC code.
New packages in Debian this week include the following and [19]36
more:
* [20]debian-cd: Tools for building (Official) Debian CD set
* [21]flick: Flexible IDL Compiler Kit ([22]dev, [23]doc)
* jzip: Text mode interpreter for Z-Code adventures, etc.
* [24]lwm: Lightweight Window Manager
* [25]pciutils-dev: Linux PCI Utilities (for 2.[123].x kernels)
(development files)
As usual, Debian JP news is [26]available.
Thanks to Katsura S. Yoshio and Randolph Chung for [27]contributing.
____________________________________________________________
References:
8. http://master.debian.org/~wakkerma/bugs/
9. http://www.debian.org/News/weekly/current/issue/mail#2
10. http://www.debian.org/Lists-Archives/debian-policy-9910/msg00318.html
11. http://www.debian.org/Lists-Archives/debian-policy-9910/msg00322.html
12. http://www.debian.org/Lists-Archives/debian-devel-9910/msg02053.html
13. http://www.debian.org/Lists-Archives/debian-legal-9910/msg00045.html
14. http://www.debian.org/News/weekly/current/issue/mail#1
15. http://www.lwn.net/1999/1028/
16. http://www.debian.org/Lists-Archives/debian-legal-9910/msg00118.html
17. http://www.debian.org/Lists-Archives/debian-legal-9911/msg00018.html
18. http://www.debian.org/Lists-Archives/debian-devel-9910/msg02195.html
19. http://master.debian.org/~tausq/newpkgs-19991101.html
20. http://www.debian.org/Packages/unstable/admin/debian-cd.html
21. http://www.debian.org/Packages/unstable/devel/flick.html
22. http://www.debian.org/Packages/unstable/devel/flick-dev.html
23. http://www.debian.org/Packages/unstable/devel/flick-doc.html
24. http://www.debian.org/Packages/unstable/x11/lwm.html
25. http://www.debian.org/Packages/unstable/devel/pciutils-dev.html
26. http://www.debian.or.jp/News/weekly/current/issue/
27. http://www.debian.org/News/weekly/contributing
--
see shy jo
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