Debian Weekly News - December 27th, 1999
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Debian Weekly News
http://www.debian.org/News/weekly/current/issue/
Debian Weekly News - December 27th, 1999
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Welcome to Debian Weekly News, a newsletter for the Debian developer
community. Once again we skipped a week; this is a two week edition.
Debian weekly news has now summarized a full year of events in Debian.
A [8]timeline of the most important stories of 1999 is available as a
special supplement to this issue.
Debian has won the 1999 Linux Journal Readers' Choice award for
"Favorite Distribution". We won with 27.3% of the vote, compared to
27.0% for SuSE and 23.6% for Red Hat. The award appears in the January
edition of [9]Linux Journal.
Richard Braakman [10]posted plans for the freeze. No completely new
packages (like those listed near the end of this newsletter) will be
accepted after January 2nd. He also mentions another bug-squashing
event. And it looks like the next version of Debian will be code-named
"woody", continuing the Toy Story theme (and opening the door for lots
of off-color jokes). Richard followed up with a post that looks beyond
the freeze and outlines a timeline for release. [11]The plan is to go
through one of two short "test cycles" inside a very short freeze,
releasing near the end of February.
Lintian now supports local overrides. This allows a package to say
that it knows it triggers a lintian error or warning, but it wants
that ignored. Use these overrides with caution, and be sure to read
[12]this message first.
Should /sbin and /usr/sbin be in a normal user's path so they can
easily run traceroute and other similar programs? It seems that many
people [13]make this change when installing Debian. Since the [14]FHS
says that "users should not have to place any of the sbin directories
in their path", people seem to agree that the real problem is that
traceroute and some other programs do not belong in sbin in the first
place. But just how to fix this without breaking things that expect to
find these programs in sbin is still under discussion; symlinks would
seem to be the easy solution but some people [15]dislike that idea.
The source code for Quake 1 was GPL'd last week, resulting in several
ITP's and other posts wondering when it would be put in Debian. Be
assured that the current maintainer of the quake packages in non-free
does intend to package the source and move it into main. After that
was resolved, another concern came up. It seems that quake and doom
are [16]not allowed in some countries, including Brazil and
([17]maybe) Germany because of their violent content. People running a
full Debian mirror in those countries could get in legal trouble for
distributing these games. Of course, quake and doom have been present
in non-free for quite a while, and have already presumably been
mirrored into those countries. A long thread resulted, with no real
conclusion reached yet. Concerned mirror admins in these countries
might want to set up some local exclusions for these games in the mean
time.
CD images for 2.1r4 are available now from [18]cdimage.debian.org
For the first time, systems are being sold preinstalled with not just
Debian GNU/Linux, but with Debian GNU/Hurd preinstalled as well on a
separate partition. Space-Time Systems is the British company
[19]offering these systems.
Two more sparc machines are [20]available for developers to use.
Following up to last edition's item about Ian Murdock's Progeny
project, here is a [21]message from Ian with some details.
New packages in Debian include the following and [22]38 more:
* [23]cyrus-common: Cyrus mail system (common files) ([24]admin,
[25]dev, [26]imapd, [27]nntp, [28]pop3d) [non-free]
* [29]funnelweb: A literate-programming tool ([30]doc)
* [31]mmix-src: Assembler and Simulator for Knuth's MMIX [non-free]
* [32]nethack-spoilers: Spoiler files for the Nethack adventure game
* [33]tasksel: New task packages selector
Thanks to Randolph Chung for [34]contributing.
_________________________________________________________________
References
8. http://www.debian.org/News/weekly/current/timeline
9. http://www.linuxjournal.com/
10. http://www.debian.org/News/weekly/current/issue/mail#2
11. http://www.debian.org/News/weekly/current/issue/mail#3
12. http://www.debian.org/Lists-Archives/debian-devel-9912/msg00971.html
13. http://www.debian.org/Lists-Archives/debian-devel-9912/msg00944.html
14. http://www.debian.org/Lists-Archives/debian-devel-9912/msg01150.html
15. http://www.debian.org/Lists-Archives/debian-devel-9912/msg01150.html
16. http://www.debian.org/Lists-Archives/debian-devel-9912/msg01159.html
17. http://www.debian.org/News/weekly/current/issue/mail#1
18. http://cdimage.debian.org/
19. http://www.debian.org/Lists-Archives/debian-commercial-99/msg00007.html
20. http://www.debian.org/Lists-Archives/debian-devel-9912/msg00932.html
21. http://www.debian.org/Lists-Archives/debian-devel-9912/msg00773.html
22. http://master.debian.org/~tausq/newpkgs-19991220.html
23. http://www.debian.org/Packages/unstable/mail/cyrus-common.html
24. http://www.debian.org/Packages/unstable/mail/cyrus-admin.html
25. http://www.debian.org/Packages/unstable/devel/cyrus-dev.html
26. http://www.debian.org/Packages/unstable/mail/cyrus-imapd.html
27. http://www.debian.org/Packages/unstable/mail/cyrus-nntp.html
28. http://www.debian.org/Packages/unstable/mail/cyrus-pop3d.html
29. http://www.debian.org/Packages/unstable/devel/funnelweb.html
30. http://www.debian.org/Packages/unstable/doc/funnelweb-doc.html
31. http://www.debian.org/Packages/unstable/devel/mmix-src.html
32. http://www.debian.org/Packages/unstable/doc/nethack-spoilers.html
33. http://www.debian.org/Packages/unstable/base/tasksel.html
34. http://www.debian.org/News/weekly/contributing
--
see shy jo
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