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Debian Weekly News - June 21st, 2000



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Debian Weekly News 
http://www.debian.org/News/weekly/current/issue/
Debian Weekly News - June 21st, 2000
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Welcome to Debian Weekly News, a newsletter for the Debian developer
community.

Release news: Richard Braakman will be gone for a week or two, and
unable to serve as release manager. In the meantime, Anthony Towns
will be [8]stepping in as Acting Release Manager. Anthony has already
[9]posted plans to end the current test cycle in the middle of this
week, and has [10]listed the changes he plans to accept into potato
before the next test cycle.

There are two security fixes this week. A [11]fix is available for a
bug in xinetd's access control mechanism, and a remote exploit of zope
has also been [12]fixed.

Looking ahead to woody, Joey Hess is [13]stepping up as the new leader
of the woody boot-floppies team. The goal is to redesign the
installation system and replace it with something more modular,
flexible, smaller, and easier to use. Debian Weekly News wishes the
boot-floppies team (and its upcoming leader ;-) luck on this ambitious
endeavor.

Another item removed from dpkg's wishlist: For years, we have run into
occasional problems where the simplest solution was "use versioned
provides". Unfortunately, the Provides: field in Debian packages has
never supported versioning. [14]It does now. However, Jason Gunthorpe
[15]points out that using versioned provides in woody will probably
lead to all sorts of upgrade trouble.

Debian's voting system, as established in the [16]Debian Constitution,
employs an interesting voting method called Concorde voting. Since
Debian is one of the few real-world organizations to make use of this
type of vote counting, we've attracted the interest of members of the
[17]Election Methods mailing list. This week, Norman Petry, a member
of the Election Methods list, [18]posted about a "circular tie"
situation where no one wins a vote, and the constitution does not
specify what should be done, leading to an undefined outcome. He has
calculated that "you can expect to encounter a circular tie about once
every 20 elections or so, on average". He suggests that we proactively
modify the constitution to fix the problem before it occurs.

Followups to last week's news:
  * The discussion about dropping non-free from Debian has died down.
    The issue is not resolved though, and will come to vote soon.
  * Last week's offer of $3k to KDE If they could fix their license
    has led to more Debian/KDE articles, including a [19]Freshmeat
    Editorial by Joseph Carter. It appears that Dr. Bechly has
    [20]withdrawn the offer, after KDE declined to send him an
    official response. He has retargeted the money to Debian, in hopes
    of improving Debian's installer.
  _________________________________________________________________

References
8. http://www.debian.org/Lists-Archives/debian-devel-announce-0006/msg00006.html
9. http://www.debian.org/Lists-Archives/debian-devel-announce-0006/msg00007.html
10. http://www.debian.org/News/weekly/current/issue/mail#1
11. http://www.debian.org/security/2000/20000619
12. http://www.debian.org/Lists-Archives/debian-devel-0006/msg01541.html
13. http://www.debian.org/Lists-Archives/debian-boot-0006/msg00279.html
14. http://www.debian.org/Lists-Archives/debian-dpkg-0006/msg00025.html
15. http://www.debian.org/Lists-Archives/debian-dpkg-0006/msg00029.html
16. http://www.debian.org/devel/constitution
17. http://www.eskimo.com/~robla/em/
18. http://www.debian.org/Lists-Archives/debian-vote-0006/msg00095.html
19. http://freshmeat.net/news/2000/06/17/961300740.html
20. http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=00/06/13/1642213&mode=nested

-- 
see shy jo



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