Debian Weekly News - November 23rd, 1999
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Debian Weekly News
http://www.debian.org/News/weekly/current/issue/
Debian Weekly News - November 23rd, 1999
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Welcome to Debian Weekly News, a newsletter for the Debian developer
community.
Adam Di Carlo [8]reports on the status of the boot floppies: "we've
mostly completed shoring up the internals of boot-floppies". With the
internals cleaned up, the boot-floppies team is ready to work on bugs
and todo list items. Adam also says that "all the major tasks are
assigned, and to capable people" and that the work on the boot
floppies is on track to be "feature complete in early December". The
best way to help with the boot floppies now is to help the team
[9]work through their [10]bug list, and to help [11]test the base
system installed by the boot floppies. This last can be accomplished
easily by unpacking a tarball and chrooting; no need to reinstall.
These are tasks anyone with even a few hours can help with, and
getting a working boot-floppies is the critical item that needs to be
accomplished before our next release.
Debian with the FreeBSD kernel was the subject of a heated week-long
discussion. It seems that since this idea was first [12]conceived in
February, a few people have been working on the port. The status of
their work can be read about [13]here. Basically, they are using the
FreeBSD kernel and libc, and recompiling Debian packages to work on
that system. Reactions varied. John Goerzen [14]worries that a version
of Debian based on a BSD copyrighted kernel would open the door to
third parties taking our work and making it proprietary, and also that
"we are essentially giving first aid to software that is dying (and
rightfully so) because of its license". Many others disagree with him
and have no problems with the BSD license. Others [15]wonder if it
wouldn't be technically better, and easier in the long run, to port
glibc to FreeBSD, and allow Debian packages to be used unchanged with
that kernel and library combination.
Guy Maor takes on the package pool. Guy [16]described a variant of the
package pool idea, and said he would implement it. This will be a
major restructuring of the Debian archive, and it will add a great
deal of flexibility: "creating a new distribution requires writing
code which answers the question, given the available versions of this
package, which one to choose?" The downside is that "mirroring by
architecture and by freeness is still possible, but mirroring by
distribution is not possible without a specialized tool." Response to
Guy's posting was enthusiastic; maybe the package pool idea will
finally become reality.
New packages in Debian this week include the following and [17]46
more:
* [18]lasg: Linux Administrator's Security Guide
* [19]netcomics: Retrieve comic strips from the Web
* [20]php4: A server-side, HTML-embedded scripting language ([21]gd,
[22]mysql, [23]pgsql, [24]snmp, [25]xml)
* [26]xshipwars-server: Dynamic space-oriented gamming system server
([27]images, [28]sounds)
Thanks to Randolph Chung for [29]contributing.
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References
8. http://www.debian.org/Lists-Archives/debian-devel-9911/msg01236.html
9. http://www.debian.org/Lists-Archives/debian-devel-9911/msg01237.html
10. http://bugs.debian.org/boot-floppies
11. http://www.debian.org/Lists-Archives/debian-boot-9911/msg00632.html
12. http://www.debian.org/News/weekly/current/8/#freebsd
13. http://www.debian.org/Lists-Archives/debian-devel-9911/msg01372.html
14. http://www.debian.org/Lists-Archives/debian-devel-9911/msg01373.html
15. http://www.debian.org/Lists-Archives/debian-project-9911/msg00087.html
16. http://www.debian.org/Lists-Archives/debian-devel-9911/msg01522.html
17. http://master.debian.org/~tausq/newpkgs-19991122.html
18. http://www.debian.org/Packages/unstable/doc/lasg.html
19. http://www.debian.org/Packages/unstable/games/netcomics.html
20. http://www.debian.org/Packages/unstable/web/php4.html
21. http://www.debian.org/Packages/unstable/web/php4-gd.html
22. http://www.debian.org/Packages/unstable/web/php4-mysql.html
23. http://www.debian.org/Packages/unstable/web/php4-pgsql.html
24. http://www.debian.org/Packages/unstable/web/php4-snmp.html
25. http://www.debian.org/Packages/unstable/web/php4-xml.html
26. http://www.debian.org/Packages/unstable/games/xshipwars-server.html
27. http://www.debian.org/Packages/unstable/games/xshipwars-images-st.html
28. http://www.debian.org/Packages/unstable/games/xshipwars-sounds-st.html
29. http://www.debian.org/News/weekly/contributing
--
see shy jo
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