Debian Weekly News - 9 to 15 Mar 1999
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Debian Weekly News
http://www.debian.org/News/weekly/current/issue/
Debian Weekly News - 9 to 15 Mar 1999
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Debian Weekly News - 9 to 15 Mar 1999
Welcome to Debian Weekly News, a newsletter for the Debian developer
community.
With Slink out the door, it's time for another giddy round of
development. To start things off, glibc 2.1 has been [8]uploaded to
unstable and is sure to cause lots of [9]interesting breakage. It's
already known to break prcs, rvplayer, libtricks, and many other
things. Next, version 5.005 of perl will be uploaded [10]very soon,
possibly breaking some 47 module packages. In short, "unstable is
called unstable for a reason" and you shouldn't upgrade to it right
now unless you're willing to deal with problems.
Santiago Vila [11]continued a discussion about how to get rid of the
obsolete 'base' package. Many interesting aspects of the dpkg system
were discussed, especially the way to remove this essential package
without damaging your system. Of course, this has been discussed
before with no resolution -- hopefully this discussion will eventually
lead to some code in a package that will get rid of base at last.
[12]Here's the start of an interesting thread about looking at the
registry file from a Windows install to ease auto-detection of
hardware when installing Debian. It branched out to cover other ways
of doing auto-detection.
A program called "swim" was [13]announced this week. It is a package
manager like dpkg (and indeed is compatible with dpkg), but uses a
binary database for speed and has other interesting features.
Here is an [14]example of the use of the new source format for dpkg,
which can support multiple patches and tarballs.
Should Debian object to companies that use "Debian" as part of their
name, their domain name, or a product they sell? Wichert is [15]asking
for thoughts on this important issue we need to decide.
A new version of APT has been [16]released. It features a new plug-in
architecture, a new config file, and lots of documentation.
Those who are making their own CD's of Slink might be interested in
some "simple but tasteful" [17]CD art.
We haven't talked about the Hurd port for a while; [18]here is a
state-of-the-Hurd report.
The [19]flame war of the week started as a [20]discussion of ways to
disassociate non-free and contrib from Debian proper. One way to do
that would be to move them to a server called nonfree.debian.org. But
as I said, a flame war followed, so read with caution.
New packages added to Debian this week include:
* [21]acfax: Receive faxes using your radio and sound card
* [22]gnucash: A personal finance tracking program
* [23]imwheel: Mouse "wheel" support for X and console
* [24]kaffe: A JVM and JIT Java compiler, almost JDK1.2 compliant
* [25]wsound prefs: Preferences editor for wmsound, the Window Maker
sound server
Followups to previous news items:
* More information about LinuxWorld keeps trickling in. [26]Here is
Joseph Carter's summary of his experiences there.
* Two gnome staging areas are set up now, for details see this
[27]README.
Thanks to this week's contributors: Michael Dahlberg, Randolph Chung,
and Brandon Mitchell.
_________________________________________________________________
Last Modified: Tue, Mar 16 21:43:54 UTC 1999
Copyright © 1997-1999 [31]SPI; See [32]license terms
References
8. http://www.debian.org/Lists-Archives/debian-devel-changes-9903/msg00713.html
9. http://www.debian.org/Lists-Archives/debian-devel-9903/msg01185.html
10. http://www.debian.org/Lists-Archives/debian-devel-9903/msg00979.html
11. http://www.debian.org/Lists-Archives/debian-devel-9903/msg00641.html
12. http://www.debian.org/Lists-Archives/debian-devel-9903/msg00411.html
13. http://www.debian.org/Lists-Archives/debian-devel-9903/msg00856.html
14. http://www.debian.org/News/weekly/1999/11/mail#1
15. http://www.debian.org/Lists-Archives/debian-devel-9903/msg00994.html
16. http://www.debian.org/News/weekly/1999/11/mail#2
17. http://www.debian.org/~dunham/CD
18. http://www.debian.org/Lists-Archives/debian-hurd-9903/msg00110.html
19. http://www.debian.org/Lists-Archives/debian-devel-9903/msg00797.html
20. http://www.debian.org/Lists-Archives/debian-devel-9903/msg00213.html
21. http://www.debian.org/Packages/unstable/hamradio/acfax.html
22. http://www.debian.org/Packages/unstable/utils/gnucash.html
23. http://www.debian.org/Packages/unstable/x11/imwheel.html
24. http://www.debian.org/Packages/unstable/interpreters/kaffe.html
25. http://www.debian.org/Packages/unstable/sound/wsoundprefs.html
26. http://www.debian.org/Lists-Archives/debian-devel-9903/msg00714.html
27. http://www.debian.org/~jim/debian-gtk-gnome/README
--
see shy jo
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