Debian Weekly News - September 21st, 1999
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Debian Weekly News
http://www.debian.org/News/weekly/current/issue/
Debian Weekly News - September 21st, 1999
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Welcome to Debian Weekly News, a newsletter for the Debian developer
community.
Debconf has been released. Debconf is a configuration management tool
that lets Debian packages ask questions at install time using several
different interfaces. Plain text, dialog, GTK and web UI's are
currently supported, as well as non-interactive intallations. It will
support remote databases in the future, allowing whole clusters of
machines to be configured the same. Read the [8]introduction to
Debconf for more information. Quite a few people are eager to begin
using it soon.
Corel has started a closed beta test of their Corel Linux
distribution. Unfortunatly, they did so under a very restrictive
license, that [9]violates the GPL in several respects. The good news
is that Bruce Perens has already [10]contected Corel and we're
promised that this will be fixed.
The debian-laptop list has made a [11]proposal for making Debian more
laptop friendly. The idea is to create special laptop kernels, plus a
laptop meta package that pulls together everything a laptop user
needs. There seems to be "no Linux distribution with a dedicated
laptop support" yet, so Debian would be leading the way in this area.
Should proftpd be moved to contrib for security reasons? Many security
holes have been found it it lately and it seems likely more will show
up in the future, so some think it's a good idea to [12]move it out of
the main distribution. The maintainer prefers to [13]wait and see what
the situation is like when we freeze.
Joey Hess [14]posted what he confesses is a "crazy idea": Fly all the
developers into a central location and have a debian conference. Many
people would like to go to such an event and think it'd be a good
thing for Debian and a lot of fun. But of course, no one knows where
we could find the large amount of money this would take, or what could
possibly be considered a central location for such a distributed
project.
Here's the [15]Debian JP News for this week. It includes an
interesting "virtual apt server" that generates packages apt requests,
from a running Debian system, using dpkg-repack.
New packages in Debian this week include the following and [16]28
more:
* [17]chbg: ChBg is used for changing desktop background pictures in
X11
* [18]clanlib0-display-glx: ClanLib display target for MesaGL
([19]dev)
* [20]jmon: distributed resource monitor
* [21]libgc5: Conservative garbage collector for C ([22]dev)
* [23]libgd-gif1: GD Graphics Library with gif support ([24]tools,
[25]dev)
* [26]libmon-perl: mon Perl modules for clients and server
* [27]libsnmp4.0: UCD SNMP (Simple Network Management Protocol)
Library. ([28]dev)
* [29]pidentd: TCP/IP IDENT protocol server.
* [30]pydb: An enhanced Python command-line debugger
* [31]python-pam: A Python interface to the PAM library.
Followups to last week's news:
* In the wake of last week's changes the the Bug Tracking System,
Darren Benham posted a [32]summary of the changes he's made so
far. The biggest changs are that old fixed bugs are never deleted
anymore, they are archived, and that the BTS fully supports
PGP/GPG signed and mime formatted email.
* The Debian Quality Assurance [33]web site is up.
Thanks to Randolph Chung and Katsura S. Yoshio for [34]contributing.
_________________________________________________________________
References
8. http://www.debian.org/Lists-Archives/debian-devel-9909/msg01500.html
9. http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=99/09/20/1051226&mode=nested
10. http://www.debian.org/Lists-Archives/debian-user-9909/msg02660.html
11. http://www.snafu.de/~wehe/debian_linux.html
12. http://www.debian.org/Lists-Archives/debian-devel-9909/msg01433.html
13. http://www.debian.org/Lists-Archives/debian-devel-9909/msg01434.html
14. http://www.debian.org/Lists-Archives/debian-devel-9909/msg01283.html
15. http://www2.osk.3web.ne.jp/~shishamo/debian/trans/djwn/wn091999.html
16. http://master.debian.org/~tausq/newpkgs.html
17. http://www.debian.org/Packages/unstable/graphics/chbg.html
18. http://www.debian.org/Packages/unstable/libs/clanlib0-display-glx.html
19. http://www.debian.org/Packages/unstable/devel/clanlib0-display-glx-dev.html
20. http://www.debian.org/Packages/unstable/admin/jmon.html
21. http://www.debian.org/Packages/unstable/libs/libgc5.html
22. http://www.debian.org/Packages/unstable/devel/libgc5-dev.html
23. http://www.debian.org/Packages/unstable/libs/libgd-gif1.html
24. http://www.debian.org/Packages/unstable/graphics/libgd-gif-tools.html
25. http://www.debian.org/Packages/unstable/libs/libgd-gif1-dev.html
26. http://www.debian.org/Packages/unstable/interpreters/libmon-perl.html
27. http://www.debian.org/Packages/unstable/admin/libsnmp4.0.html
28. http://www.debian.org/Packages/unstable/devel/libsnmp4.0-dev.html
29. http://www.debian.org/Packages/unstable/net/pidentd.html
30. http://www.debian.org/Packages/unstable/devel/pydb.html
31. http://www.debian.org/Packages/unstable/interpreters/python-pam.html
32. http://www.debian.org/Lists-Archives/debian-devel-9909/msg01579.html
33. http://qa.debian.org/
34. http://www.debian.org/News/weekly/contributing
--
see shy jo
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