Debian Weekly News - January 4th, 2000
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Debian Weekly News
http://www.debian.org/News/weekly/current/issue/
Debian Weekly News - January 4th, 2000
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Welcome to Debian Weekly News, a newsletter for the Debian developer
community.
Everyone's probably sick of Y2K by now, but a final wrap-up is in
order. Debian survived with no major problems. Several more
Y2K-related bugs were found in packages including [8]ntpdate,
[9]sendfile, [10]webalizer, [11]birthday, [12]cbb, [13]pilot-manager,
[14]slrn, [15]xinetd, [16]http-analyze, and [17]hyperlatex. These bugs
are rapidly being fixed, and tend to be minor.
The closed new-maintainer queue has moved back into people's minds
this week, with several threads starting on the subject, like [18]this
one started by a Debian contributor who has been forced to work
through a sponsor. "the Debian Castle has been built and now all the
builders are holed up inside with everyone else standing at the moat
with the drawbridge up. Some brave folks put ladders up and scaled the
walls [...] to get in and help continue the ongoing construction
inside the Castle. Many of the inhabitants of the Castle are showing
signs of denial, others are [19]blaming the King, and still others are
smuggling people in over the wall as fast as they can." Several people
mentioned that new-maintainer might be reopened this month (after the
freeze, presumably).
While adding new maintainers to Debian continues to be an unresolved
issue, we are making progress towards finding inactive developers. In
the past we have used developer "pings", but now Jason Gunthorpe has
[20]implemented a new method for tracking developer activity. He calls
it "Echelon" and it monitors all Debian list traffic and keeps track
of the last time a developer has been heard from. In 6 months or so we
can start using this information to contact and deal with inactive
maintainers and make sure that every package has an active person
responsible for it.
Anyone who recently installed a fresh Debian system using the potato
boot floppies has a severely broken system that is open to numerous
exploits due to [21]permissions problems. The boot-floppies team has
fixed the problem, and it's likely very few people are affected, since
few people have tried the potato boot floppies yet. Work on the boot
floppies continues, on many fronts.
Should TeX and Emacs be removed from standard and put in optional?
They are the largest packages present in the standard install, and
they are singlehandedly responsible for doubling the size of a
standard Debian install. Robert Woodcock [22]raised the issue, arguing
that these packages are not widely enough used to justify putting them
in standard. Predictably, opinions on this vary. One of the more
[23]interesting messages steps back and looks at our whole section and
priority system -- and finds it badly lacking.
New packages in Debian this week include the following and [24]20
more. Presumably these will be the among the last new packages added
to Debian in a while, since a pre-freeze moratorium on new packages in
now in effect.
* [25]aolserver: AOL Web Server
* [26]dpkg-www: WWW interface to dpkg package info.
* [27]everybuddy: An all in one messaging client
* [28]heartbeat: High-availability and IP-takeover tool
* [29]libncurses5: Shared libraries for terminal handling
([30]debug, [31]dev)
* [32]quake2-bin: commercial 3D action game from the makers of Doom
[non-free]
Thanks to Randolph Chung for [33]contributing.
_________________________________________________________________
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References
8. http://bugs.debian.org/53805
9. http://bugs.debian.org/53817
10. http://bugs.debian.org/53820
11. http://bugs.debian.org/53821
12. http://bugs.debian.org/53846
13. http://bugs.debian.org/53831
14. http://bugs.debian.org/53811
15. http://bugs.debian.org/53865
16. http://bugs.debian.org/54029
17. http://bugs.debian.org/53938
18. http://www.debian.org/Lists-Archives/debian-devel-001/msg00090.html
19. http://www.debian.org/Lists-Archives/debian-project-9912/msg00052.html
20. http://www.debian.org/Lists-Archives/debian-project-001/msg00007.html
21. http://www.debian.org/Lists-Archives/debian-devel-001/msg00023.html
22. http://www.debian.org/Lists-Archives/debian-devel-9912/msg01444.html
23. http://www.debian.org/Lists-Archives/debian-devel-001/msg00054.html
24. http://master.debian.org/~tausq/newpkgs-20000103.html
25. http://www.debian.org/Packages/unstable/web/aolserver.html
26. http://www.debian.org/Packages/unstable/doc/dpkg-www.html
27. http://www.debian.org/Packages/unstable/x11/everybuddy.html
28. http://www.debian.org/Packages/unstable/admin/heartbeat.html
29. http://www.debian.org/Packages/unstable/base/libncurses5.html
30. http://www.debian.org/Packages/unstable/devel/libncurses5-dbg.html
31. http://www.debian.org/Packages/unstable/devel/libncurses5-dev.html
32. http://www.debian.org/Packages/unstable/games/quake2-bin.html
33. http://www.debian.org/News/weekly/contributing
34. http://www.debian.org/MailingLists/subscribe
--
see shy jo
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