Debian Weekly News - March 18th, 2003
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Debian Weekly News
http://www.debian.org/News/weekly/2003/11/
Debian Weekly News - March 18th, 2003
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Welcome to this year's 11th issue of DWN, the weekly newsletter for
the Debian community. For some time a French group and the French
chapter of the Free Software Foundation Europe ([1]ABUL) have been
[2]working on the idea to have Free Software classified as an
intangible world cultural heritage term by the [3]UNESCO.
1. http://www.abul.org/
2. http://www.fsfeurope.org/projects/mankind/
3. http://www.unesco.org/
Leader Election Debate. This year's [4]election [5]debate on IRC
took place on March 7th with about 100 people [6]attending. After the
candidates clarified their position the debate ended with some
humorous items. Martin Michlmayr would probably win if only the
candidates could vote (and couldn't give their vote to themselves).
This seems to demonstrate that Branden Robinson hasn't yet got his
stated superpower of choice, perhaps Bdale Garbee's amateur satellite
counteracts the effects. Moshe Zadka stated that he would like his
term (if elected) to be remembered for establishing world-peace,
although he thinks that would be as unlikely as the other candidates'
goals. Meanwhile, Manoj sent the second [7]call for votes.
4. http://www.debian.org/vote/2003/vote_0001
5. http://www.debian.org/vote/2003/dpl-debate.log
6. http://www.debian.org/vote/2003/dpl-discuss.log
7. http://lists.debian.org/debian-vote-0303/msg00065.html
Debian at the OpenOffice.org Conference. Chris Hall, Rene Engelhard,
and Jan-Hendrik Palic will be [8]representing Debian at the
[9]OpenOffice.org Conference at the University of Hamburg, Germany on
March 20/21. Chris will give a talk that introduces the process of
making OpenOffice.org Debian packages. It will give an overview of the
existing techniques used to build OpenOffice.org and to integrate it
into the operating system. Also, he will introduce some of the
important tips, tricks, tools and resources for packagers.
8. http://www.debian.org/News/2003/20030314
9. http://marketing.openoffice.org/conference/
Maintaining Fonts in Debian. Colin Walters [10]talked about the Debian
Font Manager (defoma) which was used to install fonts. However there
is also fontconfig, which is a more generic way for applications to
find and use fonts, which is used by several applications already.
Emile van Bergen [11]proposed a smooth two-way transition that
preserves defoma but still moves towards fontconfig.
10. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-0303/msg00494.html
11. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-0303/msg00499.html
Status report for Debian-Installer GTK-Frontend. Sebastian Ley posted
a [12]status report about the GTK frontend of the debian-installer.
Work has been done to provide the necessary libraries as udebs,
although the frontend is still unusable. A lot of debugging needs to
be done and the concept of how the GTK frontend will be integrated
must be worked out and implemented. This [13]screenshot is not exactly
eye-candy but it shows that progress is being made. Help, comments and
discussion would be welcome.
12. http://lists.debian.org/debian-boot-0303/msg00293.html
13. http://lists.debian.org/debian-boot-0303/msg00293.html
Making Mailing Lists available as Mailboxes. Josip Rodin [14]wondered
if Debian should publish the mbox files of the list archives on the
website. This would reveal much more data for spammers to crawl
through, which could be good or bad: all the message-IDs would make
spam databases less useful, although it might cause people in Sender
fields to be spammed. Santiago Vila thought it was a [15]bad idea and
suggested looking at the way the Geocrawler or Sourceforge lists are
handled. Osamu Aoki [16]thought it depended upon how publication was
done and suggested that using gzip compression would be best.
14. http://lists.debian.org/debian-www-0303/msg00149.html
15. http://lists.debian.org/debian-www-0303/msg00152.html
16. http://lists.debian.org/debian-www-0303/msg00153.html
Standardizing PAM Policies. Sebastian Rittau [17]spoke about the lack
of a PAM policy. In his opinion most packages use PAM for
authentication in the wrong way. They all install a configuration file
in the /etc/pam.d/ directory that look similar to each other. Steve
Langasek [18]prepared a patch that adds support for an inclusion
mechanism.
17. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-0303/msg00804.html
18. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-0303/msg00816.html
LSB 1.3 Compliance? Gerhard Tonn [19]ran the latest LSB [20]test suite
on woody for S/390. He used a modified glibc and pax as [21]described
by Anthony Towns. The results are very promising except that there are
about 50 failures in the internationalization area which has been a
part of the LSB since version 1.3. This is caused by the fact that not
all the relevant [22]patches are integrated into woody packages. The
same is true for sid.
19. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-0303/msg00825.html
20. http://www.linuxbase.org/test/
21. http://lists.debian.org/debian-policy-0208/msg00103.html
22. http://www.openi18n.org/subgroups/utildev/dli18npatch2.html
Potato Packages in Woody. Johann Glaser [23]wondered why still so many
packages in woody (and sarge and sid) are linked from potato. His
concerns resulted from a broken mirror that does not contain potato
anymore. Not all packages have been updated since the release of
potato and hence are not using the pool structure yet. This will
change when potato gets removed from the main archive.
23. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-0303/msg00828.html
Is PHPNuke Free Software? John Goerzen [24]wondered if the important
notice that has been added to the license of PHPNuke prohibits
modifications and derived works. The author wants to have his
copyright notice visible in the footer of all pages that are rendered
by PHPNuke. Branden Robinson agreed and [25]added that the addition to
the license is more restrictive than the BSD advertising clause.
24. http://lists.debian.org/debian-legal-0302/msg00164.html
25. http://lists.debian.org/debian-legal-0302/msg00167.html
Overview about IPv6 in Debian. Massimo Di Nitto [26]announced a
comprehensive [27]web page that contains information about IPv6
support in Debian packages. The idea emerged to classify packages
according to different criteria. The [28]statistics are generated
dynamically.
26. http://lists.debian.org/debian-ipv6-0303/msg00005.html
27. http://debian.fabbione.net/stat/
28. http://debdev.fabbione.net/cgi-bin/getstats
New Accessibility Development. Mario Lang [29]announced the recently
created [30]debian-accessibility list. The list will help coordinate
finding, identifying, discussing and fixing accessibility related
issues in the Debian Operating System. It might be related to the
hearing impaired, to the sight impaired, or to people with physical
disabilities which for instance, limit their typing capabilities and
so on.
29. http://lists.debian.org/debian-accessibility-0302/msg00000.html
30. http://lists.debian.org/debian-accessibility/
Is the LPPL a Free License? Martin Pitt is packaging latex-ucs and
[31]wondered if the [32]LaTex Project Public License (LPPL) combined
with additional permissions from the author satisfies the [33]Debian
Free Software Guidlines. Branden Robinson [34]explained that no
conclusion has been reached concerning this license. However,
negotiations are ongoing between Debian and LaTex Project Developers
and Branden is confident that a mutually amicable arrangement will be
reached.
31. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-0303/msg01010.html
32. http://www.latex-project.org/lpll.txt
33. http://www.debian.org/social_contract#guidelines
34. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-0303/msg01048.html
Report about Debian at CeBIT exhibition. Alexander Schmehl wrote a
[35]report about the Debian booth at this year's CeBIT exhibition that
was sponsored by [36]LinuxLand. The booth was a big success and many
visitors stopped by. Both, Alexander and Michael 'grisu' Bramer, who
staffed the booth, seemed to enjoy the opportunity to demonstrate the
Debian system during CeBIT. Tomorrow (Wednesday) is the last day of
CeBIT, so interested people could still stop by in hall 6 at booth A52
/ 182.
35. http://www.debian.org/events/2003/0312-cebit-report
36. http://www.linuxland.de/
Security Updates. You know the drill. Please make sure that you update
your systems if you have any of these packages installed.
* [37]tcpdump -- Denial of service.
* [38]samba -- Remote exploit.
* [39]netpbm -- Denial of service.
37. http://www.debian.org/security/2003/dsa-261
38. http://www.debian.org/security/2003/dsa-262
39. http://www.debian.org/security/2003/dsa-263
New or Noteworthy Packages. The following packages were added to the
unstable Debian archive recently or contain important updates.
* [40]asciijump -- Small and funny ASCII-art game about ski jumping.
* [41]checkpw -- checks password which is stored in
~Maildir/.password.
* [42]eclipse -- Extensible Tool Platform and Java IDE.
* [43]eukleides -- Euclidean geometry drawing language.
* [44]gkrellmd -- Multiple stacked system monitors: 1 process
[daemon].
* [45]gpsmanshp -- A Tcl interface to shapelib.
* [46]idn -- Command line and emacs interface to GNU libidn.
* [47]k3b -- A sophisticated KDE cd burning application.
* [48]mb2md -- Converting Mbox mailboxes to Maildir format.
* [49]mcvs -- Version control system built around CVS.
* [50]ml-lex -- Lexical analyzer generator for Standard ML.
* [51]ml-yacc -- Parser generator for Standard ML.
* [52]mpb-mpi -- MIT Photonic-Bands, parallel (mpich) version.
* [53]sleepenh -- Sleep until a given date with subsecond
resolution.
* [54]smlnj -- Standard ML of New Jersey interactive compiler.
* [55]toppler -- Clone of the "Nebulous" game on old 8 and 16 bit
machines.
* [56]trackballs -- An OpenGL-based game of marbles through a
labyrinth.
* [57]vifm -- Ncurses based file manager with vi like keybindings.
* [58]xmltoman -- Simple XML to man converter.
40. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/games/asciijump.html
41. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/mail/checkpw.html
42. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/devel/eclipse.html
43. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/math/eukleides.html
44. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/x11/gkrellmd.html
45. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/interpreters/gpsmanshp.html
46. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/misc/idn.html
47. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/otherosfs/k3b.html
48. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/net/mb2md.html
49. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/devel/mcvs.html
50. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/devel/ml-lex.html
51. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/devel/ml-yacc.html
52. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/science/mpb-mpi.html
53. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/utils/sleepenh.html
54. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/devel/smlnj.html
55. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/games/toppler.html
56. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/games/trackballs.html
57. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/utils/vifm.html
58. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/devel/xmltoman.html
Orphaned Packages. 4 packages were orphaned this week and require a
new maintainer. This makes a total of 178 orphaned packages. Many
thanks to the previous maintainers who contributed to the Free
Software community. Please see the [59]WNPP pages for the full list,
and please add a note to the bug report and retitle it to ITA: if you
plan to take over a package.
59. http://www.debian.org/devel/wnpp/
* [60]jade -- James Clark's DSSSL Engine. ([61]Bug#184552)
* [62]kannel -- WAP and SMS gateway. ([63]Bug#185224)
* [64]openh323proxy -- H.323 voice over IP gatekeeper with proxy
support. ([65]Bug#184972)
* [66]postilion -- An X Mail User Agent which handles MIME, PGP and
Spelling. ([67]Bug#184858)
* [68]scanmail -- Mail scanner for Postfix. ([69]Bug#184971)
60. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/text/jade.html
61. http://bugs.debian.org/184552
62. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/non-us/kannel.html
63. http://bugs.debian.org/185224
64. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/comm/opengate-proxy.html
65. http://bugs.debian.org/184972
66. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/mail/postilion.html
67. http://bugs.debian.org/184858
68. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/mail/scanmail.html
69. http://bugs.debian.org/184971
Want to continue reading DWN? Please help us create this newsletter.
Some people are submitting items already, but we are still in need of
volunteer writers who prepare items. Please see the [70]contributing
page to find out how to help. We're looking forward to receiving your
mail at [71]dwn@debian.org.
70. http://www.debian.org/News/weekly/contributing
71. mailto:dwn@debian.org
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