Debian Weekly News - October 3rd, 2000
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Debian Weekly News
http://www.debian.org/News/weekly/current/issue/
Debian Weekly News - October 3rd, 2000
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Welcome to Debian Weekly News, a newsletter for the Debian community.
It should be safe to use unstable again. With [1]this upload of glibc,
the change that caused most of the problems was reverted. The db2
libraries will remain in Debian's glibc for the time being to provide
backwards compatibility. Ben Collins [2]explains: "I don't have time
to list everything it fixes, but I can tell you that it fixes EVERY
issue that EVERYONE was having."
Discussion this week focused on the bug tracking system, especially
the (ab)use of bug severities. It started off with [3]this post from
Anthony Towns, who is not the first to notice that far too many bug
reports seem to be flagged important. Anthony wondered if changing the
definition of important bugs could help with this problem. The ensuing
discussion revealed some disquieting things. There is a growing
perception among both users and developers that normal severity bugs
are often ignored, and an inflated severity is needed to ensure a bug
gets attention. As Sean Perry [4]put it, "short of lighting a fire
under someone, some bugs are simply ignored." One way to combat this
perception, be it true or false, is to become more active in fixing as
many bugs as possible. Anthony proposed that "maybe we should have
some bugsquash months instead of just bugsquash weekends" and wondered
if we could make it a release goal to ship with only 8000 open bugs.
Even users can help; it's now easy to [5]look up all the bugs you
have submitted. (There is even a [6]search form on the web site.)
When Roland Rosenfeld did that, he said he was "shocked how many of
them were still open. Some of them were already fixed in the packages,
but the maintainer had forgotten to close the bug reports. Some
trivial to fix bugs weren't attac(k)ed for months or years " Every bug
reporter can take a look at the bugs they've filed, close any that
have accidentally been fixed but not closed, and perhaps send the
maintainer a gentle reminder to do something about the rest. The
problems discussed in this thread can't be solved easily, only a great
deal of hard work can make all bugs be dealt with promptly.
Tuxtops is offering Debian pre-loaded on their laptops. The [7]press
release says it is "specially tuned for laptops" and mentions some
installation improvements. According to their [8]Quickstart Guide, it
is based on woody.
New packages in Debian this week include the following, and [9]31
more:
* [10]aeromail: Web-based e-mail client
* [11]sather: Compiler and programming environment for Sather.
([12]browser, [13]doc, [14]lwp, [15]emacs mode)
* [16]sphinx2: speech recognition utilities ([17]lib, [18]language
data, [19]dev)
Kernel Cousin Debian #4 [20]is out and covers many threads from the
past few weeks that were not mentioned in DWN. If you think this issue
of DWN is too short, give it a read.
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References
1. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-changes-0009/msg02620.html
2. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-0009/msg02198.html
3. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-0009/msg02232.html
4. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-0010/msg00101.html
5. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-0010/msg00048.html
6. http://bugs.debian.org/
7. http://lwn.net/daily/tuxtops-debian.php3
8. http://www.tuxtops.com/Documentation/quickstart_debian.htm
9. http://auric.debian.org/~tausq/newpkgs-20001003.html
10. http://www.debian.org/Packages/unstable/mail/aeromail.html
11. http://www.debian.org/Packages/unstable/devel/sather.html
12. http://www.debian.org/Packages/unstable/devel/sather-browser.html
13. http://www.debian.org/Packages/unstable/devel/sather-doc.html
14. http://www.debian.org/Packages/unstable/devel/sather-lwp.html
15. http://www.debian.org/Packages/unstable/devel/sather-mode.html
16. http://www.debian.org/Packages/unstable/sound/sphinx2-bin.html
17. http://www.debian.org/Packages/unstable/libs/libsphinx2g0.html
18. http://www.debian.org/Packages/unstable/sound/sphinx2-language.html
19. http://www.debian.org/Packages/unstable/devel/libsphinx2-dev.html
20. http://kt.linuxcare.com/debian/dd20000928_4.epl
--
see shy jo
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