Debian Weekly News - October 25th, 2000
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Debian Weekly News
http://www.debian.org/News/weekly/current/issue/
Debian Weekly News - October 25th, 2000
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Welcome to Debian Weekly News, a newsletter for the Debian community.
Debian has package pools! James Troup [1]revealed that "for the last
month and a half, I've been working on re-implementing dinstall and
switching to package pools." His message gives details about how
regular users, developers, and mirror admins will be affected (not
much, not much, and a great deal), the new layout of the Debian
archive, the database backend, the migration strategy ("an
as-of-yet-unwritten tool will migrated n Mb of data a day into the
pool from the legacy dists/ tree"), and the timeline before this is
put in place on the Debian archive (about two weeks).
A beta version of the LSB-FHS test suite was ran against several major
distributions including Debian woody, which failed 17 tests out of
243. A [2]chart shows that other distributions failed many more, while
SuSE only failed 5. The [3]detailed report of Debian's failures is
interesting reading. After [4]examining each failure, Wichert
Akkerman commented, "Not all of the test results are fair in my
opinion: some are real bugs in Debian, others are bugs in the
testsuite or the result of using an incomplete install." Some were
really bugs in the test suite, a few were things that should [5]not
be in the FHS, and 6 of the 9 remaining failures "can be fixed by
simply creating empty directories" Since FHS editor Daniel Quinlan and
the [6]author of the test suite are involved in the discussion, it
appears that all of these things will be eventually worked out.
Why isn't Helix Gnome in Debian yet? For a while now there has been
duplication of effort, with Peter Teichman of Helix maintaining an apt
repository of Helix Gnome packages, and other Debian developers
maintaining regular Gnome in Debian. The only real reason for this
duplication of work is that Peter thinks that there might be
[7]copyright problems with some of the images in Helix Gnome, but
he's not sure, and for whatever reason this question has been
unresolved for some time now. Meanwhile, some folks [8]feel that "the
woody packages aren't BAD, but after using Helix, going back feels
like a serious downgrade", and others [9]have found that the Helix
packages "do not have the same quality when it comes to dependencies
and such". A subthread that tried to list the differences between the
two sets of packages found very little of note besides Helix's
branding. Whatever the differences, many people are using the Helix
debs, and bothering Debian developers with things like [10]this bug
report. This situation really needs to be resolved before it has a
chance to turn ugly.
Debian's newest server is klecker.debian.org, which is now serving as
Debian's [11]main web server. Of course, it's named after Joel "Espy"
Klecker. Unfortunately, many home directories from the old
va.debian.org machine, which suffered a disk failure, have still not
been recovered and may be [12]gone for good. A new hostname,
people.debian.org has also been [13]set up, "which will exclusively be
used for individual web pages". Developers with personal Debian web
pages should begin using URLs based on the new domain name.
New packages in Debian this week include the following, and [14]80
more:
* [15]insight: Graphical debugger based on gdb
* [16]kannel: WAP and SMS gateway
* [17]scigraphica: Scientific graphics and data manipulation
* [18]webmin: Web based administration interface
There were no security announcements this week.
More and more Debian news sources are appearing. The latest arrival is
[19]Debian Planet, a web site providing Debian news in a weblog
format. In the meantime, [20]Kernel Cousin Debian is up to their 7th
issue, but still needs more contributors.
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References
1. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce-0010/msg00007.html
2. http://www.linuxbase.org/test/results/
3. http://www.linuxbase.org/test/results/Detailed_Debian_Woody.html
4. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-0010/msg01440.html
5. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-0010/msg01731.html
6. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-0010/msg01490.html
7. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-0010/msg01462.html
8. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-0010/msg01432.html
9. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-0010/msg01438.html
10. http://bugs.debian.org/75244
11. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-0010/msg01678.html
12. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-0010/msg01701.html
13. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-0010/msg01706.html
14. http://auric.debian.org/~tausq/newpkgs-20001024.html
15. http://www.debian.org/Packages/unstable/devel/insight.html
16. http://www.debian.org/Packages/unstable/net/kannel.html
17. http://www.debian.org/Packages/unstable/math/scigraphica.html
18. http://www.debian.org/Packages/unstable/admin/webmin.html
19. http://www.debianplanet.org/
20. http://kt.linuxcare.com/debian/latest.epl
--
see shy jo
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