Debian Weekly News - September 28th, 1999
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
Debian Weekly News
http://www.debian.org/News/weekly/current/issue/
Debian Weekly News - September 28th, 1999
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
Welcome to Debian Weekly News, a newsletter for the Debian developer
community.
The Developer's Database is now on-line. With the [8]web and [9]mail
interfaces to the database, developers can enter various information
about themselves, including contact information, vacation status,
latitude and longitude, and passwords for some of the project's
machines. The best thing to come out of it so far is the [10]developer
map, which shows just how global a project Debian is. Developers are
encouraged to add thier coordinates to the database.
People who want to download CD images are now walked through a very
clever question and answer process at [11]cdimage.debian.org, designed
to weed out those who don't really need a CD image from those who do,
and let people in the former group know about better alternatives. The
really clever bit is the new method for downloading Debian CD's. In
the past, cdimage.debian.org and its mirrors were frequently overloded
as people downloaded huge files from them. The new method allows any
normal Debian mirror be used as a CD image mirror -- without
containing CD images! If that piques your curiosity, read all about it
[12]here.
The boot floppies team is in need of a leader. Enrique Zanardi has
[13]stepped down from leading the boot floppies effort due to time
constraints. The good news is that with some [14]recent fixes, the
unstable boot floppies finally build and work on i386 platforms again.
It will probably take another floppy to install the next release of
Debian; the rescue floppy has been split in two to allow today's
larger kernels and libc to fit on it.
Should it be possible to install more than one daemon of the same type
at the same time? Currently it's not; the packages conflict because
they need to bind to the same port. While it's rare to need two pop
daemons or two web servers on the same system, it's [15]not unheard
of, and some people want to be able to do it with Debian. Others go
[16]a step further and would prefer daemons do not start automatically
when installed. Both of these desires would lead to additional
prompting at install time, at best, although debconf could
[17]alleviate this. No consensus has been reached on this issue.
As usual a [18]summary of news from the Debian JP project is
available.
New packages in Debian this week include the following 8 plus [19]8
more:
* [20]debconf: Debian configuration management system
* [21]gnosamba: A graphical configuration utility for Samba
* [22]gpart: Guess PC disk partition table, find lost partitions
* [23]green-card: A foreign function interface prepocessor for
Haskell
* [24]libstddis-hugs98: Runtime support for Green Card -produced
modules for Hugs 98
* [25]printtool: Printer administration tool
* [26]squishdot: Web-based News/Discussion System
* [27]tkworld: a GUI to shell commands
Followups:
* There's been a lot of coverage of the Corel problem, including
some in the mainsteam press such as this [28]article in the Ottawa
Citizen. This LinuxWorld [29]article is also worth reading. To
hear Corel's side of the story, see this [30]letter in which they
state that "The restrictions on reproduction and distribution of
the Beta version of Corel LINUX contained in the Beta Testing
Agreement are intended to apply only to those components of Corel
LINUX that were independently developed by Corel without the use
of Open Source software."
Thanks to Katsura S. Yoshio and Randolph Chung for [31]contributing.
_________________________________________________________________
8. http://db.debian.org/
9. http://www.debian.org/News/weekly/current/issue/mail#1
10. http://www.debian.org/devel/developers.loc
11. http://cdimage.debian.org/
12. http://panic.et.tudelft.nl/~costar/pseudo-image-kit/README
13. http://www.debian.org/Lists-Archives/debian-boot-9909/msg00200.html
14. http://www.debian.org/Lists-Archives/debian-boot-9909/msg00216.html
15. http://www.debian.org/Lists-Archives/debian-devel-9909/msg01912.html
16. http://www.debian.org/Lists-Archives/debian-devel-9909/msg01967.html
17. http://www.debian.org/Lists-Archives/debian-devel-9909/msg01980.html
18. http://www2.osk.3web.ne.jp/~shishamo/debian/trans/djwn/wn092799.html
19. http://master.debian.org/~tausq/newpkgs-19990927.html
20. http://www.debian.org/Packages/unstable/admin/debconf.html
21. http://www.debian.org/Packages/unstable/admin/gnosamba.html
22. http://www.debian.org/Packages/unstable/admin/gpart.html
23. http://www.debian.org/Packages/unstable/devel/green-card.html
24. http://www.debian.org/Packages/unstable/libs/libstddis-hugs98.html
25. http://www.debian.org/Packages/unstable/admin/printtool.html
26. http://www.debian.org/Packages/unstable/web/squishdot.html
27. http://www.debian.org/Packages/unstable/x11/tkworld.html
28. http://www.ottawacitizen.com/business/990922/2891977.html
29. http://www.linuxworld.com/linuxworld/lw-1999-09/lw-09-corelbeta.html
30. http://linuxtoday.com/stories/10357.html
31. http://www.debian.org/News/weekly/contributing
--
see shy jo
Reply to: