Debian Weekly News - March 20th, 2002
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Debian Weekly News
http://www.debian.org/News/weekly/2002/12/
Debian Weekly News - March 20th, 2002
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Welcome to this year's twelfth issue of DWN, the weekly newsletter for
the Debian community.
Voting starts on Sunday. Manoj Srivastava, the Project Secretary,
posted an [1]update to the election process. The voting starts on
Sunday March 24th 00:00 UTC. At 21:00 UTC, Saturday 23th March, there
will be an IRC debate in #debian-debate on OpenProjects IRC Network.
1. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce-0203/msg00013.html
Boot floppies 3.0.21 released. Adam Di Carlo [2]asked for more
non-i386 testing of the installation system. This release is the first
one which builds against Woody instead of sid. Like most releases of
boot-floppies, it has an impressive list of changes. Please help test
those so we can get Woody out the door soon.
2. http://lists.debian.org/debian-boot-0203/msg01007.html
Pre-release XFree 4.1.0-15 .debs. Branden Robinson has pre-release
.debs available at his [3]repository. As he [4]writes: <crass
bribe>The sooner I can put this release to bed, the sooner I can work
on 4.2.0.</crass bribe>. So, please help test those packages and
report bugs to the [5]debian-x mailing list.
3. http://people.debian.org/~branden/woody/
4. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-0203/msg00531.html
5. mailto:debian-x@lists.debian.org
Censoring Debian? irssi-scripts got a [6]bug report about a racist
joke which was used as a kick message. This spawned a long, long
[7]thread about censorship with both tongue-in-cheek and serious
comments. We won't even try to summarize the thread here. However, it
spawned some interesting threads about censorship, whether perl is
offensive and whether Debian Jr. should conflict with offensive
packages.
6. http://bugs.debian.org/138092
7. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-0203/msg00829.html
CeBIT Trip Report. Even though the Debian project wasn't able to
acquire a booth at this year's CeBIT exhibition, which is the largest
computer show in Europe, there have been some interesting activities
with regard to Free Software and GNU/Linux. Several Free Software
advocates attended this event. We found out that the only CDs
containing GNU/Linux that were handed out to visitors contained a
derivative of the Debian system: [8]Knoppix, which was distributed by
the [9]Agency for IT Security of the Federal Ministry of the Interior
of Germany, and a specialized system that we are going to report about
in our next issue. It seems that the hype is over and GNU/Linux is
becoming an accepted operating system among others.
8. http://www.knoppix.de/
9. http://www.bsi.bund.de/
update_output.txt explained. The scripts which install packages into
testing generate two files which are useful to understand why a
package isn't moved into testing. Those are [10]update_output.txt and
[11]update_excuses.html. Those are somewhat explained at Jules Bean's
[12]Unofficial Testing FAQ. In addition, Anthony Towns [13]explained
it some more.
10. http://ftp-master.debian.org/testing/update_output.txt
11. http://ftp-master.debian.org/testing/update_excuses.html
12. http://people.debian.org/~jules/testingfaq.html
13. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-0203/msg00901.html
Linda announced and pre-released. Steve Kowalik wrote a replacement
for lintian, [14]Linda, which is in python instead of perl. She was
[15]announced and pre-released this week. Linda follows in lintian's
footsteps by being modular and extensible, although she checks
packages a lot faster than lintian. Steve tells us that he hopes Linda
will be uploaded to the archive when the crypto-in-main confusion dies
down.
14. http://people.debian.org/~stevenk/linda
15. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-0203/msg01097.html
Debian GNU/Linux User is Poor Hacker? Several months ago, Franck
Alcidi made some interesting drawings which show respective GNU/Linux
users' image: Debian Geek, RedHat Geek, SuSE Geek, Mandrake Geek and
so on, as shown in [16]Linux Gazette 72th issue. He described the
Debian Geek as a poor and real hacker.
16. http://www.linuxgazette.com/issue72/alcidi.html
How to split packages? Junichi Uekawa [17]wondered how to split
packages. Colin Watson gave some [18]advice on it, and how he handled
the split of groff into groff and groff-base.
17. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-0203/msg01399.html
18. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-0203/msg01414.html
Securing Debian Manual 2.0 released. Javier Fernández-Sanguino Peña
informed us that he had updated the [19]Securing Debian Manual. The
translations are not up-to-date yet. [20]Javier is looking for people
to fix the FIXMEs and translate the manual.
19. http://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/securing-debian-howto/index.en.html
20. mailto:jfs@computer.org
New or Noteworthy Packages. The following packages were added to the
Debian archive recently.
Because of the ongoing crypto-in-main transition, dinstall seems to
have been stopped, so we are postponing this week's New Packages List
to the next issue.
Security Updates. You know the drill. Please make sure that you update
your systems if you have any of these packages installed.
* No security advisories this week!
Got News? Please inform us about everything that is happening in the
Debian community. We are always looking for any interesting stories to
add, especially new items by volunteer writers, and topics we tend to
miss. We're looking forward to receiving your mail at
[21]dwn@debian.org.
21. mailto:dwn@debian.org
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