Debian Weekly News - May 24th, 1999
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Debian Weekly News
http://www.debian.org/News/weekly/current/issue/
Debian Weekly News - May 24th, 1999
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Welcome Debian Weekly News, a newsletter for the Debian developer
community.
Either Wichert Akkerman or a cron job that is surprisingly good at
imitating him [8]posted the Call for Votes for the new Debian logo.
There are seven candidates which you can see [9]here. Cast your
[10]ballot!
The big topic of discussion this week is rewriting dpkg. First Aaron
Van Couwenberghe posted [11]his plans to completely rewrite dpkg in
C++. Though this rather predictably sparked a C vs. C++ flame war ("I
don't care what language you rewrite dpkg in, as long as it's C"), the
important thing is that everyone who posted agrees that dpkg needs to
be rewritten.
Next, Ben Collins [12]announced the DPKGv2 Project, which has in fact
already been quietly preparing to rewrite dpkg. They are working on
finishing their design specification and then the project will open up
a bit for public comment.
Should the "nag" messages be turned off? For those who haven't
received one, these are automated messages sent out periodically to
the maintainers of packages with old bugs, in hopes that the reminder
will lead to a fix. However, as their name suggests, these nags can be
annoying, especially to those who keep up with their bugs by other
means, and they cannot be turned off. During the [13]heated
discussions about turning them off, the messages were frequently
compared to spam. Opinions are divided, though the majority view seems
to be that they should be turned off or at each developer should at
least be allowed to disable them. Brian White, who is responsible for
the messages, has been notably silent on the subject.
Ben Collins [14]issued a call for PAM support. Everyone who maintains
packages that could use it are encouraged to enable PAM support if
possible, and look for patches to add it otherwise.
News from LinuxExpo: Many CD's given away, a cool "Debian Developed
Here" [15]world map, light sabre duels with Slashdot staff, and other
fun all described [16]here and [17]here.
It was a good week for advertising and mentions in the press. Debian
gets prominent mention on every page of the new [18]linux.com portal,
which runs Debian. There's also a banner ad on the front page.
[19]Here's an idea about a way to team up with some Debian vendors and
get a full page ad in Linux Journal. Speaking of which, an article on
Linux Standards in the June Linux Journal quotes both Nils Lohner and
Wichert Akkerman, and that issue also contains an article on RAID by
Martin Schulze.
Aren't editor wars fun? We had [20]one this week on debian-devel,
focused on what editor should go on the boot disks. The only
conclusion that resulted is that ae's vi emulation mode is more
trouble than it's worth, so it has been removed from ae.
New packages added to Debian this week include the following and
[21]39 more, including lots of [22]roxen modules:
* [23]libstdc++2.9-glibc2.1-dbg: The GNU stdc++ library (debugging
files)
* [24]libunicode-map8-perl: Perl module to map 8bit character sets
to Unicode
* [25]libunicode-string-perl: Perl modules for Unicode strings
* [26]pointerize: Internationalization utilities, based on gettext
* [27]realplayer: Real Player G2 (installer)
* [28]snmpd: CMU SNMP (Simple Network Management Protocol) Agent.
There were no new packages announcements last week because of
technical difficulties. These packages were new last week:
* [29]lsof (for kernel 2.2.24): lists open files
* Netscape 4.6: Netscape version 4.6 ([30]base, [31]java support,
[32]statically linked binaries, [33]dynamically linked binaries)
Server news:
* pandora.debian.org is now on the 6bone. [34]This is a good
opportunity for people to start working on IPv6 support. (A few
kinks are still being worked out; IPv6 may not always be turned
on.)
* faure.debian.org was [35]upgraded to kernel 2.2.9 and will be
upgraded to potato soonish.
Followups to previous news items:
* The Debian JP team has decided not to release a "potato-jp" set of
add-on Japanese packages. Instead they're working to merge their
packages into Debian proper. To that end, three or four more
members of Debian JP have become developers.
Thanks to Randolph Chung, Christian Meder and Katsura S. Yoshio for
[36]contributing.
_________________________________________________________________
[38]Back issues of this newsletter are available.
Debian Weekly News is edited by [39]Joey Hess.
_________________________________________________________________
References
7. http://www.debian.org/search
8. http://www.debian.org/News/weekly/1999/21/mail#1
9. http://vote.debian.org/1999/vote_0004
10. http://www.debian.org/Lists-Archives/debian-devel-announce-9905/msg00024.html
11. http://www.debian.org/Lists-Archives/debian-devel-9905/msg01250.html
12. http://www.debian.org/Lists-Archives/debian-devel-9905/msg01405.html
13. http://www.debian.org/Lists-Archives/debian-devel-9905/msg01168.html
14. http://www.debian.org/Lists-Archives/debian-devel-9905/msg01544.html
15. http://www.debian.org/~jgoerzen/lexpo-photos/thursday/Image16.jpg
16. http://www.debian.org/Lists-Archives/debian-devel-9905/msg01551.html
17. http://www.debian.org/Lists-Archives/debian-devel-9905/msg01707.html
18. http://www.linux.com/
19. http://www.debian.org/Lists-Archives/debian-devel-9905/msg01619.html
20. http://www.debian.org/Lists-Archives/debian-devel-9905/msg01537.html
21. http://master.debian.org/~tausq/newpkgs.html
22. http://packages.debian.org/libroxen
23. http://www.debian.org/Packages/unstable/devel/libstdc++2.9-glibc2.1-dbg.html
24. http://www.debian.org/Packages/unstable/interpreters/libunicode-map8-perl.html
25. http://www.debian.org/Packages/unstable/interpreters/libunicode-string-perl.html
26. http://www.debian.org/Packages/unstable/devel/pointerize.html
27. http://www.debian.org/Packages/unstable/contrib/net/realplayer.html
28. http://www.debian.org/Packages/unstable/net/snmpd.html
29. http://www.debian.org/Packages/unstable/utils/lsof-2.2.html
30. http://www.debian.org/Packages/unstable/web/netscape-base-46.html
31. http://www.debian.org/Packages/unstable/web/netscape-java-46.html
32. http://www.debian.org/Packages/unstable/web/netscape-smotif-46.html
33. http://www.debian.org/Packages/unstable/web/netscape-dmotif-46.html
34. http://www.debian.org/Lists-Archives/debian-devel-9905/msg01836.html
35. http://www.debian.org/Lists-Archives/debian-alpha-9905/msg00118.html
36. http://www.debian.org/News/weekly/contributing
37. http://www.debian.org/MailingLists/subscribe
38. http://www.debian.org/News/weekly/
39. mailto:joeyh@debian.org
--
see shy jo
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