Debian Weekly News - November 14th, 2000
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Debian Weekly News
http://www.debian.org/News/weekly/2000/37/
Debian Weekly News - November 14th, 2000
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Welcome to Debian Weekly News, a newsletter for the Debian community.
Debian 2.2r1 is released. This update to r0 contains many security
fixes and important bug fixes, as listed in the [1]changelog. But in a
departure from tradition, this minor release also has some new and
updated packages. Console-apt has finally made it into a released
version of Debian, and mozilla was updated to M18. Release manager
Anthony Towns [2]explains: "I'm treating updates to stable under two
principles: they should make users notably better off; and they
shouldn't ever make it harder for users to do anything they were doing
before." Adding new packages and updating packages that were "fairly
broken originally " meet these criteria, though this change
[3]shocked and bothered some. And indeed, there are at least [4]two
broken packages in the new release, although it is reported that apt
will simply [5]refuse to upgrade to the broken packages. [6]Now that
2.2r1 is released, expect package pools to be rolled out soon, and r2
to come out "relatively quickly".
A troubled vote has expired. No, not in that election; the Debian
project secretary [7]announced that the General Resolution regarding
non-free has expired because nothing was done about it during a four
week period, and the Debian constitution stipulates that such a
seemingly dead resolution "is considered to have been withdrawn".
Furthermore, "the recent vote was conducted in error, and its ballots
are hereby voided and the results have not been tabulated." With the
amount of confusion surrounding that vote, this is probably a good
thing, but it is also a breakdown of Debian's voting process. Calls
for votes were posted, but the secretary did not act on them by
releasing a ballot until far too late. Of course like all other
members of Debian, the secretary is a volunteer whose time may be
limited. He [8]has stated that "I am back on active status", and that
"my lack of time for Debian was part of the reason for seeking new
employment". He is also working to involve two other people in the
process so votes can proceed in the future even if the secretary is
absent. Where do we go from here? The GR might be re-submitted, and
several related proposals are [9]in the wings.
A number of security fixes were released this week. There are fixes
for a remote [10]denial of service attack against bind, a
[11]temporary file problem in tcsh, and a [12]signature verification
bug in gnupg. Debian has been reported [13]not vulnerable to a root
exploit in the modutils package.
Glibc 2.2 has entered unstable, but this new upstream version does not
seem to have broken anything. Instead, the new packages shave about 17
megabytes off the size of every Debian system -- Ben Collins has come
up with an [14]ingenious solution to the unnecessary locale
information problem that was [15]previously covered in DWN.
Dale Scheetz [16]announced that the "doorway into Debian is fully open
once again", with over 100 applicants currently working their way
through the new maintainer process, and less than 100 more waiting to
begin the process. Good job, everyone!
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References
1. ftp://ftp.debian.org/debian/dists/Debian2.2r1/ChangeLog
2. http://lists.debian.org/debian-release-0011/msg00001.html
3. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-0011/msg00976.html
4. http://lists.debian.org/debian-release-0011/msg00016.html
5. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-0011/msg01087.html
6. http://lists.debian.org/debian-cd-0011/msg00033.html
7. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce-0011/msg00004.html
8. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce-0011/msg00005.html
9. http://lists.debian.org/debian-vote-0011/msg00036.html
10. http://www.debian.org//security/2000/20001112
11. http://www.debian.org/security/2000/20001111a
12. http://www.debian.org/security/2000/20001111
13. http://www.debian.org/News/weekly/2000/37/mail#1
14. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-0011/msg00649.html
15. http://www.debian.org/News/weekly/2000/33#locale
16. http://lists.debian.org/debian-news-00/msg00042.html
--
see shy jo
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