Debian Weekly News - July 26th, 2005
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Debian Weekly News
http://www.debian.org/News/weekly/2005/30/
Debian Weekly News - July 26th, 2005
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Welcome to this year's 30th issue of DWN, the weekly newsletter for
the Debian community. The hosting offer for two important Debian
machines ended and they are being temporarily [1]relocated to [2]HP,
resulting in a temporary downtime of several services. Lars Wirzenius
[3]reported that [4]piuparts, a testing utility for Debian packages,
has been added to the archive.
1. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2005/07/msg00013.html
2. http://www.hp.com/
3. http://liw.iki.fi/liw/log/2005-07.html#20050719b
4. http://packages.debian.org/piuparts
Greylisting for Debian Hosts. Santiago Vila would like the project to
[5]consider using greylisting, a technique to delay mails, on Debian
hosts. Rich Walker [6]explained that some mail servers can't cope
with such delays. Florian Weimer [7]added that zombie software that
is locked out with greylisting will probably be improved in the
future, leaving greylisting without effect. Marc Haber [8]noted that
[9]exim runs the queue every 30 minutes, which would be a significant
for many users.
5. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2005/06/msg01550.html
6. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2005/06/msg01624.html
7. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2005/06/msg01704.html
8. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2005/06/msg01697.html
9. http://packages.debian.org/exim
Setting the CPU Frequency Policy. Mattia Dongili [10]pondered setting
a default governor for the CPU frequency on boot during the rc.S stage
in order to set the policy early during the boot process. Bernd
Eckenfels [11]explained that setting it early during startup doesn't
help since reducing the CPU frequency during boot is not useful and
having the CPU run at full speed for a short moment won't drain the
battery.
10. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2005/07/msg00026.html
11. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2005/07/msg00768.html
Potential Debconf Abuse. Jörg Sommer [12]wondered if using debconf to
ask about the default look for an editor would be abuse. Hamish
Moffatt [13]pondered whether it is necessary to ask such a question
when there is a sensible default. Petter Reinholdtsen [14]proposed to
use priority low but then there's not much point in [15]asking it at
all.
12. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2005/07/msg00114.html
13. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2005/07/msg00139.html
14. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2005/07/msg00140.html
15. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2005/07/msg00146.html
Automatic Password Generation. Olaf van der Spek [16]wondered how to
tell the admin about a newly generated password to access a daemon on
their system. The best method would probably be to store it in a
configuration file in /etc as John Hasler [17]pointed out and protect
it from unauthorised persons by using sane permissions.
16. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2005/07/msg00209.html
17. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2005/07/msg00210.html
Multi-Architecture Proposal. Nikita Youshchenko [18]asked about the
status of the [19]multi architecture proposal. While this is not
required to support the pure amd64 port which is going to be
integrated into Debian, it is a requirement for supporting sparc64,
s390x, mips64, mipsel64 and powerpc64. It is [20]planned to provide
only a limited number of packages for native 64-bit use on these
architectures instead of the entire archive.
18. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2005/07/msg00232.html
19. http://raw.no/debian/amd64-multiarch-2
20. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2005/07/msg00354.html
Debian Logo Font. Andreas Tille [21]wondered if the font used on the
Debian [22]logo is available as TeX font as well and could be used for
the "Debian-Med" sign. Jörg Friedrich [23]mentioned the [24]wiki page
with more details and contributed a [25]mail by Gerfried Fuchs that
revealed [26]Poppl Laudatio Condensed as used font.
21. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2005/07/msg00251.html
22. http://www.debian.org/logos/
23. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2005/07/msg00256.html
24. http://wiki.debian.net/?DebianLogo
25. http://lists.debian.org/debian-www/2003/08/msg00261.html
26. http://www.identifont.com/show?U5
Bug Mail Subscription. Joachim Breitner [27]announced a new bug
subscription feature of the [28]bug tracking system (BTS). During
[29]DebConf the feature was integrated into the BTS and the
listserver. It is now [30]possible to [31]subscribe and unsubscribe to
individual bug reports. This also works for non-existing bug numbers.
27. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2005/07/msg00490.html
28. http://www.debian.org/Bugs/
29. http://www.debian.org/events/2005/0710-debconf
30. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2005/07/msg00014.html
31. http://www.debian.org/Bugs/Developer#subscribe
Changed Program Behaviour. Matt Kraai [32]reported that the behaviour
of [33]texi2html has changed recently. The new version will place the
generated HTML files in a sub-directory when it is asked to split by
chapter. This will cause several packages to fail during their
building stage.
32. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2005/07/msg00614.html
33. http://packages.debian.org/texi2html
Debian QA Meeting. Martin Zobel-Helas [34]announced a [35]QA team
meeting taking place from the 9th to the 11th of September in
Darmstadt, Germany. He noted that the group is already maintaining
about 265 packages that have accumulated around 633 bugs. The aim of
this meeting is to fix long outstanding bugs, improve the QA
infrastructure and work on documentation.
34. http://lists.debian.org/debian-qa/2005/07/msg00123.html
35. http://qa.debian.org/
Debian Conference ends in a Success. The Debian project [36]announced
that this year's [37]Debian Conference was a great success with more
than 300 people attending and over 20 sponsors. One highlight was the
presentation about the large-scale deployment of 80,000 Debian
workstations in Extramadura, Spain. The presentations were captured by
the video team and are available [38]online.
36. http://www.debian.org/News/2005/20050724
37. http://www.debian.org/events/2005/0710-debconf
38. http://dc5video.debian.net/
Debtags finally integrated. Enrico Zini [39]reported that Packages
files recently started to include [40]debtags information that others
had already [41]noticed. The tag information can be browsed [42]online
and edited with either [43]debtags-edit or [44]tagcolledit.
39. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2005/07/msg00016.html
40. http://debtags.alioth.debian.org/
41. http://blog.drinsama.de/erich/en/linux/debian/2005071901-tags-in-packages
42. http://debian.vitavonni.de/packagebrowser
43. http://packages.debian.org/debtags-edit
44. http://packages.debian.org/tagcolledit
Security Updates. You know the drill. Please make sure that you update
your systems if you have any of these packages installed.
* DSA 763: [45]zlib -- Remote denial of service.
* DSA 764: [46]cacti -- Several vulnerabilities.
* DSA 765: [47]heimdal -- Arbitrary code execution.
* DSA 766: [48]webcalendar -- Information disclosure.
45. http://www.debian.org/security/2005/dsa-763
46. http://www.debian.org/security/2005/dsa-764
47. http://www.debian.org/security/2005/dsa-765
48. http://www.debian.org/security/2005/dsa-766
New or Noteworthy Packages. The following packages were added to the
unstable Debian archive [49]recently or contain important updates.
49. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/newpkg_main
* [50]codeville -- Distributed version control system.
* [51]faust -- Functional programming language for realtime audio
applications.
* [52]qpsmtpd -- Flexible SMTP daemon for network-level spam
detection.
* [53]sisu -- Electronic document collection generator, search
enabling.
* [54]windowlab -- Small and simple Amiga-like window manager.
50. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/devel/codeville
51. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/sound/faust
52. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/mail/qpsmtpd
53. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/text/sisu
54. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/x11/windowlab
Want to continue reading DWN? Please help us create this newsletter.
We still need more volunteer writers who watch the Debian community
and report about what is going on. Please see the [55]contributing
page to find out how to help. We're looking forward to receiving your
mail at [56]dwn@debian.org.
55. http://www.debian.org/News/weekly/contributing
56. mailto:dwn@debian.org
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