December 14th, 1999
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
Debian Weekly News
http://www.debian.org/News/weekly/current/issue/
Debian Weekly News - December 14th, 1999
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
Welcome to Debian Weekly News, a newsletter for the Debian developer
community. This edition covers two weeks of news, since there wasn't
enough of interest last week to make a full issue of DWN.
Debian 2.1r4 has been released. A recommended upgrade for anyone using
stable, it consists of [8]equal parts y2k fixes and security fixes
Getting this out in time has been a [9]last minute scramble, and the
people who put in long hours this weekend should be commended. It
seems likely that a few more y2k issues will crop up in the weeks
ahead -- for example a fix for a y2k problem in nethack was only
[10]fixed upstream a few days ago, and did not make it into the
release.
Security fixes have been released for [11]dump, [12]sendmail and
[13]htdig.
Debian Project Leader elections are due to start now, but rather than
have them run over the holiday season the Project Secretary is
planning to put them off until January. [14]The plan is to begin
nominations on January 9th. January is shaping up to be a busy month
-- remember that the freeze is scheduled for January 15th, just one
month from today.
Anthony Towns has [15]set up a "testing" distribution on
[16]lully.debian.org. This distribution is meant to be somewhere in
between stable and unstable. Anthony's code makes sure that upgrading
packages in testing does not cause any dependancy problems. It also
only moves packages into testing once they have been around for two
weeks and have presumably been found to be bug-free. This has
potential to become a useful distribution for people who want the
cutting-edge power of unstable without the bugs.
Jason Gunthorpe [17]posted about how to use the email gateway to the
developer database. The email gateway allows setting of a few things,
like ssh authorized keys and debian.net DNS entries, that cannot be
changed via the [18]web interface.
What are all these Debian leaders up to? Debian founder Ian Murdock
(with investment help from Bruce Perens) is starting a
[19]Debian-based business called "Progeny Linux". It will "produce a
commercial derivation of the Debian GNU/Linux distribution for the
scientific and technical markets" and aims to "show other commercial
Linux distributions by example how to succeed while continuing to be
good citizens of the Open Source community" Ian is also a member of
Bruce's [20]Linux Capital Group, which incidentally now has Wichert
Akkerman on its [21]advisory board.
Followups to previous news items:
* Wichert's [22]Slashdot interview answers some common questions,
and includes some things that might be news to developers as well:
"What we plan to do for potato once it is released is create
update-packs on a regular basis. An update-pack is a set of
packages that you can install on top of stable and extend or
upgrade it in some way. Examples could be a Y2K pack, a GNOME pack
or a KDE pack."
* Corel's lawyers [23]posted a response to the EULA problem. They
maintain that the EULA is necessary to ensure that the GPL can be
enforced.
Here are a few of the many new packages added to Debian in the past
two weeks:
* [24]aptitude: Console based apt frontend
* [25]cvsbook: Open Source Development with CVS, an online book
* [26]freecdb: a package for creating and reading constant databases
* [27]ghc4: GHC - the Glasgow Haskell Compilation system ([28]doc,
[29]libsrc, [30]prof)
* [31]gnome-napster: Gnome client of the popular windows napster
program
* [32]qcad: professional CAD System.
* [33]xcruise: Fly about 3D-formed file system.
* [34]courier-imap: IMAP daemon with PAM and Maildir support.
* [35]spruce: GTK+ application for sending/receiving email.
* [36]syslog-ng: Next generation logging daemon.
As usual, news from the Debian-JP project is [37]available.
Thanks to Randolph Chung and Katsura S. Yoshio for [38]contributing.
_________________________________________________________________
References
8. ftp://ftp.debian.org/debian/dists/stable/ChangeLog
9. http://www.debian.org/Lists-Archives/debian-release-9912/msg00040.html
10. http://www.nethack.org/v330/index.html
11. http://www.debian.org/security/1999/19991202
12. http://www.debian.org/security/1999/19991207
13. http://www.debian.org/security/1999/19991209
14. http://www.debian.org/Lists-Archives/debian-devel-announce-9912/msg00003.html
15. http://www.debian.org/Lists-Archives/debian-project-9912/msg00031.html
16. http://lully.debian.org/~ajt/debian/dists/testing/
17. http://www.debian.org/Lists-Archives/debian-devel-9912/msg00627.html
18. http://db.debian.org/
19. http://linuxvc.com/Articles/Investments
20. http://linuxvc.com/
21. http://linuxvc.com/Articles/AdvisoryBoard
22. http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=99/12/03/099221&mode=nested
23. http://www.debian.org/Lists-Archives/debian-legal-9912/msg00051.html
24. http://www.debian.org/Packages/unstable/admin/aptitude.html
25. http://www.debian.org/Packages/unstable/doc/cvsbook.html
26. http://www.debian.org/Packages/unstable/utils/freecdb.html
27. http://www.debian.org/Packages/unstable/devel/ghc4.html
28. http://www.debian.org/Packages/unstable/doc/ghc4-doc.html
29. http://www.debian.org/Packages/unstable/doc/ghc4-libsrc.html
30. http://www.debian.org/Packages/unstable/libs/ghc4-prof.html
31. http://www.debian.org/Packages/unstable/net/gnome-napster.html
32. http://www.debian.org/Packages/unstable/graphics/qcad.html
33. http://www.debian.org/Packages/unstable/games/xcruise.html
34. http://www.debian.org/Packages/unstable/mail/courier-imap.html
35. http://www.debian.org/Packages/unstable/mail/spruce.html
36. http://www.debian.org/Packages/unstable/admin/syslog-ng.html
37. http://www.debian.or.jp/News/weekly/current/issue/
38. http://www.debian.org/News/weekly/contributing
--
see shy jo
Reply to: