Debian Weekly News - April 6th and April 12th, 1999
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Debian Weekly News
http://www.debian.org/News/weekly/1999/14/
http://www.debian.org/News/weekly/1999/15/
Debian Weekly News - April 6th and April 12th, 1999
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Welcome to a special combined two week edition of Debian Weekly News, a
newsletter for the Debian developer community. Last week we skipped mailing
Debian Weekly News to this list because it was 3 days late and rather short.
So now we've combined issues 14 and 15 into one message for your reading
pleasure.
The logo team has chosen 4 candidates for our new logo. Wichert has
made a [8]web page displaying 4 excellent new logos and our current
logo. You can also read Wichert's [9]commentary on each logo, which
begins the one week discussion period before voting begins. At the
same time, Wichert has [10]proposed a vote on whether we should have a
single logo or an official and a liberal use logo.
There has been some grumbling about the logos that the logo team
picked. Not everyone likes the available choices, and some people
would like to add another logo to the ballot. Darren Benham points
out that this is allowed by our constitution; see his [46]message
for details on proposing an amendment to the logo ballot.
Neal Stephenson, award winning author of Snow Crash and other
cyberpunk science fiction turns out to be a user and fan of Debian.
He's written an [11]article on operating systems in which he enthuses
about Debian and specifically about the bug tracking system. "I use a
distribution called Debian [...] what really sold me on it was its
phenomenal bug database"
What's the buggiest package in Debian? It's easy to find out using
Raphaël Hertzog's [12]pages which [13]score packages based on
different criteria, including number of bugs, number of lintian
errors, and ages of bugs. Also, the pages listing critical bug reports
are back online, at a [14]new location.
A 12 page "review of Debian 2.1 as a platform for econometric
research" has been [15]written by James MacKinnon, an economics
professor.
Adam Di Carlo [16]posted a list of items that need to be fixed in
Slink. This includes moving in the source to kernel 2.2.5, and makedev
and lsof fixes. A consensus was quickly reached that these fixes need
to go into a point release of Slink.
Several proposals of different kinds were made this week:
* Here is a [19]proposal for how to make the info system FHS
compliant. This would be another step along the long road to a
fully FHS-compliant Debian.
* Avery Pennarun [20]posted about a way to allow the use of
/dev/modem symlinks safely, without having to worry about other
programs using /dev/ttySx and thus ignoring the lock files that
indicate /dev/modem is locked. He proposes that programs that
access serial devices follow symlinks, so they will follow the
/dev/modem symlink and still lock /dev/ttySx. Fabrizio Polacco
[21]pointed out that the liblockdev library already does this, but
it is only used by one package. Some discussion followed about
changing policy to mandate programs use the library.
* Joey Hess posted a [22]proposal and explanation of the changes he
plans to make to the xaw-wrappers package so it will not need to
use dpkg-divert.
A [23]thread popped up on debian-user featuring the authors of pine
talking about the copyright of pine. It's worth reading to understand
why the authors of pine have given it the copyright they have, which
keeps it in non-free and allows it to be distributed only as source.
There was a bit of [24]discussion about knfs, the kernel nfs server,
and about how to let it be used when a 2.2.x kernel is in use while
still allowing the old user space nfs server to be used with 2.0.x
kernels, and allowing people who prefer the user space server to
continue to use it.
Following a thread about how long it takes for the new-maintainer team
to process an application, James Troup sent a [25]mail that gives a
good feel for the current situation. "Processing can take under 10
minutes or it can take > 1.5 years+." Hopefully no one in the queue
will have to wait that long...
Gtk and glib 1.1 are about to be removed from the archive, to be
replaced with gtk and glib 1.2. This affects a [26]fair number of
packages that are still linked to the old library. If your package is
affected, you have already gotten a bug report, but it's worth
repeating here that all such packages should be recompiled with gtk
1.2.
A debian-perl mailing list has been [27]created. It will be used for
discussion among perl module maintainers, and for the transition to
perl 5.005.
Some [28]discussion took place regarding the splitting up of
fvwm-common into separate packages, or at least renaming it. The
package has nothing fvwm-specific in it anymore.
A few packages changed hands this week. Amoung them were the mysql
packages, which [29]were passed back and forth several times before
finally ending up in the lap of Christian Hammers. And Martin Schulze
[30]unleashed upon the developers list a large list of packages he is
giving away for adoption.
Security news:
* A new version of procmail has been [31]uploaded, fixing buffer
overruns.
* There was some [32]discussion on the BugTraq mailing list about
Debian's policy of web servers exporting /usr/doc to the world,
which allows anyone to see what versions of what software are
installed on a Debian system. This was reported long ago as bug
[33]34099 against apache and as bug [34]23661 against Debian
policy. Hopefully now that it's reached such a high-profile list,
policy will be changed soon, and apache fixed.
* An official test build of XFree86 3.3.3.1 is [17]available at
last. Note that versions of X in Debian are [18]not vulnerable to
/tmp symlink race security holes that have been reported on
bugtraq.
Server news:
* Master.debian.org had an upstream network problem that resulted in
downloads from it going very slowly -- only a few bytes per
second. This didn't affect uploads, but it did affect other
things, like the updates of the web site, mirrors, etc. (This was
also responsible for [35]last week's edition of Debian Weekly News
being delayed an additional 2 days.)
* Wichert is setting up a replacement machine for non-us.debian.org,
and it should go online soon if it isn't already by the time you
read this.
New packages added to Debian this week include:
* [36]c2html - Highlight C sources for WWW presentation
* [37]pinfo - An alternative info-file viewer
* [38]vfu - A versatile file manager for the console
* [39]wmcalclock - A clock dock.app
* [40]xchat-gnome - IRC client for GNOME
* [41]gbdk - Gameboy development kit
* [42]cxterm - Wide-character xterm for chinese/korean/japanese
Thanks to our [43]contributors, Pablo Averbuj, Randolph Chung, and
Branden Robinson.
_________________________________________________________________
[44]Back issues of this newsletter are available.
Debian Weekly News is edited by [45]Joey Hess.
_________________________________________________________________
References
8. http://www.debian.org/~wakkerma/logos/
9. http://www.debian.org/News/weekly/1999/14/mail#1
10. http://www.debian.org/News/weekly/1999/14/mail#2
11. http://www.cryptonomicon.com/beginning.html
12. http://master.debian.org/~hertzog/qa/
13. http://www.debian.org/Lists-Archives/debian-qa-9903/msg00106.html
14. http://www.debian.org/Lists-Archives/debian-devel-9904/msg00105.html
15. http://www.debian.org/Lists-Archives/debian-devel-9903/msg02726.html
16. http://www.debian.org/Lists-Archives/debian-testing-9904/msg00022.html
17. http://www.debian.org/Lists-Archives/debian-devel-9904/msg00182.html
18. http://www.debian.org/News/weekly/1999/14/mail#4
19. http://www.debian.org/Lists-Archives/debian-policy-9904/msg00016.html
20. http://www.debian.org/Lists-Archives/debian-devel-9904/msg00336.html
21. http://www.debian.org/Lists-Archives/debian-devel-9904/msg00388.html
22. http://www.debian.org/Lists-Archives/debian-devel-9904/msg00435.html
23. http://www.debian.org/Lists-Archives/debian-user-9904/msg00688.html
24. http://www.debian.org/Bugs/db/35/35743.html
25. http://www.debian.org/News/weekly/1999/15/mail#2
26. http://www.debian.org/Lists-Archives/debian-devel-9904/msg00523.html
27. http://www.debian.org/Lists-Archives/debian-devel-announce-9904/msg00017.html
28. http://www.debian.org/Lists-Archives/debian-devel-9904/msg00432.html
29. http://www.debian.org/Lists-Archives/debian-devel-9904/msg00431.html
30. http://www.debian.org/Lists-Archives/debian-devel-9904/msg00497.html
31. http://www.debian.org/Lists-Archives/debian-devel-changes-9904/msg00417.html
32. http://www.debian.org/News/weekly/1999/15/mail#1
33. http://www.debian.org/Bugs/db/34/34099.html
34. http://www.debian.org/Bugs/db/23/23661.html
35. http://www.debian.org/News/weekly/1999/14/
36. http://www.debian.org/Packages/unstable/web/c2html.html
37. http://www.debian.org/Packages/unstable/doc/pinfo.html
38. http://www.debian.org/Packages/unstable/utils/vfu.html
39. http://www.debian.org/Packages/unstable/x11/wmcalclock.html
40. http://www.debian.org/Packages/unstable/net/xchat-gnome.html
41. http://www.debian.org/Packages/unstable/devel/gbdk
42. http://packages.debian.org/cxterm
43. http://www.debian.org/News/weekly/contributing.html
44. http://www.debian.org/News/weekly/
45. mailto:joeyh@debian.org
46. http://www.debian.org/News/weekly/1999/15/mail#3
--
see shy jo
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