Debian Weekly News - June 29th, 1999
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Debian Weekly News
http://www.debian.org/News/weekly/current/issue/
Debian Weekly News - June 29th, 1999
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Welcome to Debian Weekly News, a newsletter for the Debian developer
community.
A new Debian Book has been [8]published. Titled Debian GNU/Linux:
Guide to Installation and Usage, it is authored by developers John
Goerzen and Ossama Othman and should get a wide distribution in many
bookstores. It includes a CD, some profits go to the FSF, and best of
all, the entire book is GPL'd (and will soon be packaged)!
It's time to vote on the logo again. This time, the vote is a question
of swapping the official and liberal use logos. Here's the [9]Call For
Votes and here's a [10]ballot. This went to vote quickly and is the
third vote related to the logo, and there has been a bit of a reaction
against that. As Philip Hands [11]says, "Decision making in Debian has
always previously been based on consensus, even if the consensus was
simply ``We should vote on it''". This may point to a flaw in the
Debian constitution, since "Every vote so far has been conducted under
the constitution".
In security news, a new version of mailman is [12]available fixing a
security hole that allowed access to list administration webpages
without knowing the proper password.
Manoj Srivastava has put together a [13]draft of Debian policy
3.0.0.0. As the version number indicates, this is a major revision,
representing a lot of work and discussion in debian-policy over the
past few months. The two major changes are that policy now mandates
FHS compliance, and that logrotate is now Debian's preferred log
rotation tool. Other changes include merging the packaging manual into
the same source package, clarification on the use of the
Standards-Version tag, a recommendation that libtool *.la files be
included in -dev packages, and the inclusion of the menu hierarchy in
the policy package. All these changes are summarized by Manoj
[14]here.
The topic of niced cron jobs has come up again. It looks like both
anacron and cron will soon default to nicing the jobs they run. The
thread did generate [15]one valid objection this time around -- niced
cron jobs can lead to resource starvation on very heavily loaded
machines.
YASDI (Yet Another Simple Debian Installation) was announced at the
Europe-Japan Conference on Linux and Free Software. According to the
speaker writeup, YASDI allows one to automatically generate customized
distributions based on Debian and can be thought of as a
meta-distribution or meta-installer. Slides are available [16]here.
A debian-sgml mailing ist list has been [17]created, for discussion of
SGML and XML in Debian.
Stephane Bortzmeyer has [18]written a draft policy for java compilers
and virtual machines in Debian.
For a summary of what's been going on in the Debian-JP project lately,
check out [19]the Debian JP News.
The LinuxTag convention was last weekend in Germany, here's a
[20]report of Debian related activities there.
Server news:
* Debian developers now have access to [21]two Alphas (Faure,
Albert) and [22]a Sparc (Kubrick). The accounts on these machines
are now synchronized with master using LDAP.
Followups to last week's items:
* The thread about moving contrib and non-free to their own server
has predictably grown a lot this week as many people post their
thoughts on the idea. A [23]subthread asks why contrib should be
moved along with non-free. It's also worth reading Jason
Gunthorpe's [24]message about how this would really affect our
mirrors and [25]RMS's reaction to the proposal: "Hear, hear!".
Thanks to Mike Linksvayer, Christian Meder, and Katsura S . Yoshio for
[26]contributing.
_________________________________________________________________
References
1. http://www.debian.org/
2. http://www.debian.org/intro/about
3. http://www.debian.org/News/
4. http://www.debian.org/distrib/
5. http://www.debian.org/support
6. http://www.debian.org/devel/
7. http://www.debian.org/search
8. http://www.debian.org/Lists-Archives/debian-devel-9906/msg01823.html
9. http://www.debian.org/Lists-Archives/debian-vote-9906/msg00163.html
10. http://www.debian.org/Lists-Archives/debian-devel-announce-9906/msg00012.html
11. http://www.debian.org/Lists-Archives/debian-vote-9906/msg00193.html
12. http://www.debian.org/security/1999/19990623
13. http://www.debian.org/%7Esrivasta/policy.text.gz
14. http://www.debian.org/News/weekly/1999/25/mail#1
15. http://www.debian.org/Lists-Archives/debian-devel-9906/msg01728.html
16. http://www.europe-inside.com/eurojapan/slides/yasdi/
17. http://www.debian.org/Lists-Archives/debian-devel-9906/msg01862.html
18. http://www.debian.org/Lists-Archives/debian-policy-9906/msg00429.html
19. http://www.debian.org/News/weekly/1999/25/mail#2
20. http://www.debian.org/Lists-Archives/debian-devel-9906/msg02065.html
21. http://www.debian.org/Lists-Archives/debian-alpha-9906/msg00223.html
22. http://www.debian.org/Lists-Archives/debian-alpha-9906/msg00228.html
23. http://www.debian.org/Lists-Archives/debian-devel-9906/msg01550.html
24. http://www.debian.org/Lists-Archives/debian-vote-9906/msg00142.html
25. http://www.debian.org/Lists-Archives/debian-vote-9906/msg00105.html
26. http://www.debian.org/News/weekly/contributing
27. http://www.debian.org/MailingLists/subscribe
28. http://www.debian.org/News/weekly/
29. mailto:joeyh@debian.org
30. http://www.debian.org/News/weekly/1999/25/index.sv.html
31. http://www.debian.org/intro/cn
32. http://www.spi-inc.org/
33. http://www.debian.org/license
--
see shy jo
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