Debian Weekly News - June 22nd, 1999
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Debian Weekly News
http://www.debian.org/News/weekly/current/issue/
Debian Weekly News - June 22nd, 1999
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Welcome to Debian Weekly News, a newsletter for the Debian developer
community. This is a special two week combined issue since I was
unable to publish last week. I am now looking for a [8]substitute
editor.
In the wake of the logo vote, a few developers have [9]surfaced who
didn't hear about the vote until the results were announced and are
understandably upset about not getting a chance to vote. This perhaps
points to a larger problem: though all developers are supposed to
subscribe to debian-devel-announce, not all do. So there is no way to
ensure every developer sees an announcement. One fix that's been
discussed is auto-subscribing all developers to debian-devel-announce.
Debian Weekly News encourages anyone who wants to make sure they don't
miss this type of thing in the future to at least read DWN regularly.
Wichert Akkerman has proposed splitting non-free and contrib out to a
new server, nonfree.debian.org. The impetus for this is to emphasize
that they are not part of Debian, since "the distinction isn't as
visible as it used to be; advances in searching in the distribution
and tools like apt make it very hard to see when something is in main
and when not". The proposal will come up for a vote soon and is
generating lots of discussion.
The issue of signing debs has come up again. Interestingly, Wichert
Akkerman [10]says that "we will support multiple verification methods
within a year" (presumably this is related to the dpkg v2 project).
Manoj Srivastava posted a [11]good overview of the security issues
related to signing packages and some workarounds.
Speaking of security, a new version of man-db that fixes a symlink
attack has been [12]released.
Dale Scheetz posted to debian-private (reposted [13]here with his
permission) about the problems with Official Debian CD's. "Having an
Official CD has not stopped the delivery of broken CDs, and it doesn't
protect the vendor either." To help rectify this, he proposes sending
CD's to testers before publicly releasing them, and also setting up a
process that will let CD vendors put patches and other changes on the
CD's and still call them "Official".
Joost Witteveen, author of the menu package, has [14]released version
2.0 of that package, which incorporates a neat new concept: hints.
Read his post for details, but this should allow menu to optimize the
menu hierarchy it generates so there are no over-full or under-full
menus.
The APT team has released a [15]new version of APT. The most
interesting new feature is support for downloading the sources of
packages. With a "--compile" switch, apt can even launch a build of
the package!
A perl update. [16]Packages of perl 5.005 are finally [17]ready for
testing. Maintainers of perl modules and other interested parties
should read the new [18]perl policy.
Debian events:
* Both Ian Jackson and James Troup will be speaking at the [19]Linux
'99 Conference in the UK. It's on the 25th and 26th.
* The Philadelphia Debian GNU/Linux User's Group [20]met on the
16th. The meeting topic was "An Overview of Debian Policy" (DWN
apologizes for not publicizing this in time for the meeting.)
* About $7000 was donated to Debian by LinuxCare and VA at the
[21]Debian benefit. There were also a few posters given out by
LinuxCare that are similar to a certain other infamous poster.
On debian-policy there was a [22]discussion
about the undocumented.7 man page and whether it's really useful at
all. Some feel that "The undocumented(7) link is not only useless, but
actively annoying."
A few tidbits from the Debian JP project. Debian JP is doing a survey
of use of their packages, results [23]here. It seems that their
announcement of plans to merge with Debian backfired a little bit with
people thinking the project had quit. In fact their work on Japanese
localized packages continues.
Server news:
* John Goerzen has [24]set up a wanna-build database and an
autobuilder for the Debian Alpha port.
Thanks to Katsura S. Yoshio, Raphael Hertzog and Christian Meder for
[25]contributing.
____________________________________________________________
7. http://www.debian.org/search
8. http://www.debian.org/News/weekly/contributing#subeditor
9. http://www.debian.org/Lists-Archives/debian-devel-9906/msg00703.html
10. http://www.debian.org/Lists-Archives/debian-devel-9906/msg01438.html
11. http://www.debian.org/Lists-Archives/debian-devel-9906/msg01428.html
12. http://lwn.net/1999/0617/a/debman-db.html
13. http://www.debian.org/News/weekly/1999/24/mail#1
14. http://www.debian.org/Lists-Archives/debian-policy-9906/msg00370.html
15. http://www.debian.org/Lists-Archives/debian-devel-9906/msg01459.html
16. ftp://ftp.daft.com/pub/debian/experimental/
17. http://www.debian.org/Lists-Archives/debian-perl-9906/msg00020.html
18. http://pandora.debian.org/~hertzog/perl-policy.txt
19. http://www.debian.org/Lists-Archives/debian-devel-9906/msg01233.html
20. http://www.debian.org/Lists-Archives/debian-devel-9906/msg00954.html
21. http://kitenet.net/~bad/list/0212.html
22. http://www.debian.org/Lists-Archives/debian-policy-9906/msg00313.html
23. http://www.debian.or.jp/~maehara/popcon/
24. http://www.debian.org/Lists-Archives/debian-alpha-9906/msg00081.html
25. http://www.debian.org/News/weekly/contributing
--
see shy jo
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