Debian Weekly News - November 07th, 2000
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Debian Weekly News
http://www.debian.org/News/weekly/2000/36/
Debian Weekly News - November 07th, 2000
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Welcome to Debian Weekly News, a newsletter for the Debian community.
XFree86 4.0.1 has [1]entered unstable. The new version of X took
significant effort to package -- Branden Robinson worked on it nearly
full time for "about 4 months", reorganizing the entire set of
packages, waiting for security holes to be fixed, and producing some
50 test releases to work out all the kinks. The result is a
surprisingly polished upgrade (by unstable's standards anyway --
[2]many problems are still being encountered).
A slightly less polished upgrade involving perl 5.6 and dpkg 1.7.0 has
also hit unstable. A bug in the update-alternatives provided by the
new version of dpkg [3]broke perl for a while, and though the problem
is at least partly [4]resolved by now, many smaller problems are
still being dealt with. Unstable seems likely to live up to its name
for the next week or two.
The new version of dpkg has [5]several new features, including
support for marking the origin of a package for use by third party
.deb creators like HelixCode that should allow bugs to be directed to
the right place, a "statoverride" mechanism that allows overriding the
permissions of any file on the system across upgrades, an improved
dpkg-shlibdeps, and a new /etc/dpkg/dpkg.cfg config file.
Progeny has [6]announced a public beta test of Progeny Debian, "an
open source, commercial version of Debian". According to the press
release, "Progeny Debian features a new installer, as well as new
tools for administration, configuration and package management" An
announcement posted to debian-devel provides [7]more details: They
have modified several Debian packages to add Gnome interfaces, so
their package management is done via "gtasksel", a modified tasksel,
and package configuration makes heavy use of Debconf with a Gnome
frontend. Other features include hardware autodetection and GRUB.
Progeny was asked if their enhancements will be contributed back to
Debian, and [8]responded "Yes, at the discretion of the Debian
maintainers of the relevant packages." Progeny Debian is based on
unstable, and "has been tested thoroughly by Progeny's developers" --
as such, once it comes out of beta, it might serve as a useful upgrade
for those who need unstable's features but cannot deal with daily
upgrades and breakage. (See also: [9]an article on Debian Planet
about Debian and commercial variants.)
The first in a series of weekly debian-installer status reports was
[10]released, detailing what progress is being made on the new Debian
installer, and listing the many parts that have yet to be written.
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References
1. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-changes-0011/msg00160.html
2. http://bugs.debian.org/branden@debian.org
3. http://bugs.debian.org/76438
4. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce-0011/msg00002.html
5. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce-0011/msg00003.html
6. http://www.progeny.com/debian/
7. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-0010/msg02219.html
8. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-0011/msg00029.html
9. http://www.debianplanet.org/debianplanet/article.php?sid=28
10. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-0011/msg00092.html
--
see shy jo
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