Debian Weekly News - November 9th, 1999
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Debian Weekly News
http://www.debian.org/News/weekly/current/issue/
Debian Weekly News - November 9th, 1999
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Welcome to Debian Weekly News, a newsletter for the Debian developer
community.
Bad news: the freeze has been pushed back all the way to mid-January.
The main problem is the boot floppies, which probably [8]won't be
ready until then. Read Richard Braakman's [9]mail for his other
reasons for delaying the freeze. According to Richard, the best way to
help with the release at this point is to work on the boot floppies.
The second best thing people can do to help is to avoid making any
major changes to unstable, even though it's not formally frozen --
"don't start anything that you can't finish" before the new freeze
date.
Few people are happy with this postponement of the freeze, and lots of
ideas have been floated, including the idea of having a [10]partial
freeze. One idea that has gathered lots of support is Joey Hess'
[11]stable update proposal. Some kind of update needs to be made
before next year, since stable has a few [12]known Y2K problems.
Vincent Renardias, Release Manager for stable, is looking at doing an
update to slink specifically to [13]fix the y2k issues.
A new version of policy has been [14]released, and it potentially
affects every package in Debian. The major changes are a final word on
the /usr/share/doc issue, and the introduction of build dependencies.
Other changes include FHS 2.1 (reverts /var/state to /var/lib), the
deprecation of /etc/rc.boot, a MIME subpolicy, mailbox locking
updates, and the conversion of HTML changelogs to plain text format.
Another package becomes free: OpenSSH has [15]replaced the non-free
version of ssh in Debian. There are a few [16]known problems with
OpenSSH, so those who need a stable ssh might want to install the
ssh-nonfree package for now.
The size of Incoming has been a common concern this week, with many
people [17]worrying about what happens to packages that are still
stuck there when we freeze. Incoming peaked at around 800 MB last
week, though thanks to the hard work of the ftp admins, it is now
about 250 MB and has only 70 .changes files in it. Since [18]two new
members have just been added to the archive maintenance team, now five
strong, with any luck this problem won't resurface when we finally do
freeze.
Pictures of Ian Murdock, founder of Debian, are [19]available after a
recent Debian get-together in Berkeley.
A quick look at other things going on this week:
* Randolph Chung is [20]starting work on a task selection GUI.
* Netstd was [21]broken up into several smaller packages, which is
causing unanticipated problems.
* October GNOME has been [22]backported to slink.
* Martin Schulze [23]posted a HOTWO to follow if you want to create
a new Debian mailing list.
* eBay is now [24]using Debian.
* [25]Debian JP is working on translating policy, and other things.
New packages in Debian this week include the following and [26]202
more:
* [27]abcde: A Better CD Encoder
* [28]ibm-jdk1.1-installer: Installer for IBM Developer Kit for
Linux, Java(TM) Technology Edition
* [29]lavaps: a lava lamp of currently running processes
* [30]mason: Interactively creates a Linux packet filtering
firewall.
* [31]mico-2.3.0: CORBA broker as used for KDE. Mico Is COrba.
([32]dev, [33]examples)
* [34]pptpd: PoPToP Point to Point Tunneling Server
* [35]stone: TCP/IP packet repeater in the application layer.
* [36]ude: the Unix Desktop Environment
* [37]yadex: WAD file editor for doom-style WADs
Thanks to Randolph Chung and Katsura Yoshio for [38]contributing.
____________________________________________________________
References
8. http://www.debian.org/News/weekly/1999/43/mail#2
9. http://www.debian.org/Lists-Archives/debian-devel-announce-9911/msg00006.html
10. http://www.debian.org/News/weekly/1999/43/mail#3
11. http://www.debian.org/Lists-Archives/debian-devel-9911/msg00577.html
12. http://www.debian.org/y2k/extra
13. http://www.debian.org/Lists-Archives/debian-devel-9911/msg00419.html
14. http://www.debian.org/Lists-Archives/debian-policy-9911/msg00048.html
15. http://www.debian.org/Lists-Archives/debian-devel-9911/msg00167.html
16. http://www.debian.org/Lists-Archives/debian-devel-9911/msg00219.html
17. http://www.debian.org/Lists-Archives/debian-devel-9911/msg00472.html
18. http://www.debian.org/News/weekly/1999/43/mail#4
19. http://perens.com/Photos/IanMurdockParty/
20. http://www.debian.org/Lists-Archives/debian-boot-9911/msg00127.html
21. http://www.debian.org/Lists-Archives/debian-devel-9911/msg00463.html
22. http://www.debian.org/News/weekly/1999/43/mail#1
23. http://www.debian.org/Lists-Archives/debian-devel-announce-9911/msg00010.html
24. http://www.workspot.com/ebay/linux/
25. http://www.debian.or.jp/News/weekly/current/issue/
26. http://master.debian.org/~tausq/newpkgs-19991108.html
27. http://www.debian.org/Packages/unstable/sound/abcde.html
28. http://www.debian.org/Packages/unstable/devel/ibm-jdk1.1-installer.html
29. http://www.debian.org/Packages/unstable/admin/lavaps.html
30. http://www.debian.org/Packages/unstable/net/mason.html
31. http://www.debian.org/Packages/unstable/devel/mico-2.3.0.html
32. http://www.debian.org/Packages/unstable/devel/mico-2.3.0-dev.html
33. http://www.debian.org/Packages/unstable/devel/mico-2.3.0-examples.html
34. http://www.debian.org/Packages/unstable/net/pptpd.html
35. http://www.debian.org/Packages/unstable/net/stone.html
36. http://www.debian.org/Packages/unstable/x11/ude.html
37. http://www.debian.org/Packages/unstable/games/yadex.html
38. http://www.debian.org/News/weekly/contributing
--
see shy jo
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