Debian Weekly News - October 21st, 2003
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Debian Weekly News
http://www.debian.org/News/weekly/2003/42/
Debian Weekly News - October 21st, 2003
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Welcome to this year's 42nd issue of DWN, the weekly newsletter for
the Debian community. According to [1]natural computing the audit
court of the German province Mecklenburg-Vorpommern is [2]moving
their 100 systems to Debian GNU/Linux. The Dutch [3]robot soccer team
[4]Mission Impossible Twente use Debian woody as operating system and
are very pleased with it.
1. http://www.natural-computing.de/inhalte_d/news/news_sites/news.html
2. http://www.pro-linux.de/news/2003/6065.html
3. http://www.ihrt.tuwien.ac.at/FIRAWM03/
4. http://parlevink.cs.utwente.nl/robotsoccer/
Debian and the LPI. Martin Michlmayr [5]reported about a meeting and
discussions with representatives of the [6]Linux Professional
Institute (LPI). People can choose between rpm-based and dpkg-based
questions and about 25 % of the testees in a Sydney LPI lab chose
dpkg-based questions. Furthermore, LPI is working on the development
of a "Desktop Certification" and interested Debian desktop people are
encouraged to get in contact with Martin. LPI will also be present at
the [7]World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) handing out
bootable Debian CDs ([8]Morphix).
5. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce-0310/msg00013.html
6. http://www.lpi.org/
7. http://www.geneva2003.org/wsis/indexb01.htm
8. http://morphix.sourceforge.net/
Project Leader Retrospective. Martin Michlmayr [9]listed tasks he
worked on during past six months which didn't justify a report on
their own in order to be transparent and accountable. This included
several internal Debian activities, financial and legal matters,
publicity and development.
9. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce-0310/msg00014.html
Debian in the News. LinuxForce has noted that 2003 has already become
a banner year for Debian GNU/Linux. They have put together a [10]list
of the most significant news stories about Debian so far this year.
This includes the most recent awards, a Netcraft [11]survey, the
[12]case study in best practice for operating system management and
others.
10. http://www.linuxforce.net/debian.html#banneryear2003
11. http://news.netcraft.com/archives/2003/08/16/debian_linux_distribution_10_years_old_today.html
12. http://www.sage-ie.org/slides/case_study/
Package Policy Checker. Magosányi Arpád [13]wondered which policy
checker should be used since the versions in testing don't implement
the most recent [14]policy. Steve Kowalik [15]explained that [16]linda
does but that the version hasn't been installed in testing yet.
13. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-0310/msg01132.html
14. http://www.debian.org/doc/debian-policy/
15. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-0310/msg01143.html
16. http://packages.debian.org/linda
Source only Uploads. Wolfgang Borgert [17]experienced problems with a
source only upload recently. Daniel Jacobowitz [18]explained that they
are not permitted because they would encourage carelessness by the
maintainer, since these packages would not even have to be built by
the maintainer anymore. Additionally binary-all would not be built by
the buildds.
17. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-0310/msg01226.html
18. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-0310/msg01227.html
Debian in Wikipedia. Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, contains a long
[19]entry about the Debian project and its distribution. Among other
topics it mentions developer recruitment, motivation, resignation and
the package life cycle. [20]Wikipedia is a community written and
edited encyclopedia published using the GNU Free Documentation
license. Over a dozen people have contributed to the article since its
original version was written in December 2001.
19. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debian
20. http://www.wikipedia.org/
Mini-Freeze for some Packages. Steve Langasek [21]encouraged
maintainers of krb4, PostgreSQL, Heimdal, cyrus-sasl2 and coreutils
not to modify these packages until they have migrated into testing.
Several inter-package dependencies and serious problems prevent them
to enter testing at the moment. PostgreSQL is delayed by an unexpected
breakage in connection with Perl 5.8.1, heimdal conflicts with
PostgreSQL and coreutils require a new version of krb4 first.
21. http://lists.debian.org/debian-release-0310/msg00082.html
Constitutional Amendment Ballot. Manoj Srivastava [22]released the
first call for votes for the [23]constitutional amendment general
resolution in order to clarify section 4.1.5 of the [24]constitution.
Votes must be received by Wednesday, October 29th, 23:59:59 UTC. He
[25]added further information, a list of [26]fingerprints,
[27]statistics about this vote and mentioned the source code
[28]repository of the vote system.
22. http://lists.debian.org/debian-vote-0310/msg00088.html
23. http://www.debian.org/vote/2003/vote_0003
24. http://www.debian.org/devel/constitution
25. http://lists.debian.org/debian-vote-0310/msg00090.html
26. http://www.debian.org/vote/2003/gr_sec415_quorum.log
27. http://master.debian.org/%7Esrivasta/gr_sec415.html
28. http://arch.debian.org/arch/private/srivasta/archive-2003/
Testing Packages at Build-time. Bill Allombert [29]suggested to revise
the policy and ask maintainers to place automatic tests for their
packages in the build scripts, since autobuilder time seems to be a
less scarce resource than porters time. Maintainers can only tests
binary packages they will upload. They can only test an autobuilt
package once it is part of unstable and is maybe already causing
trouble. Such a prohibition is no longer part of the [30]policy,
though.
29. http://lists.debian.org/debian-policy-0310/msg00028.html
30. http://www.debian.org/doc/debian-policy/
Packaging debian-installer Images. Goswin von Brederlow [31]wondered
where images for the new installer should be uploaded. There are
floppy, CDROM, netboot and hd-install images ranging from 1.4 MB
floppies, 5-20 MB netboot/hd-install images and 5/20/50 MB CDROM iso
images, total 100-150 MB per architecture.
31. http://lists.debian.org/debian-cd-0310/msg00067.html
Security Updates. You know the drill. Please make sure that you update
your systems if you have any of these packages installed.
* [32]tomcat4 -- Denial of service.
32. http://www.debian.org/security/2003/dsa-395
New or Noteworthy Packages. The following packages were added to the
unstable Debian archive recently or contain important updates.
* [33]agsync -- Synchronization mediator for AvantGo and Pocket PC.
* [34]amule -- Another eMule P2P Client.
* [35]astats -- Statistic generator for aMule.
* [36]boson -- OpenGL wargame for KDE.
* [37]cabber -- Easy and basic jabber console client.
* [38]debian-el -- Emacs helpers specific to Debian users.
* [39]dmake -- Make utility used to build OpenOffice.org.
* [40]gandalf1 -- C library for image processing and computer
vision.
* [41]isync -- Synchronize a local maildir with a remote IMAP4
mailbox.
* [42]jspwiki -- WikiWikiWeb clone written in Java.
* [43]juk -- Music organizer and player for KDE.
* [44]luasocket -- TCP/UDP socket library for Lua 5.0.
* [45]musiclibrarian -- Simple GUI tool to organize collections of
music.
* [46]nxml-mode -- Emacs mode for editing XML documents using RELAX
NG schemas.
* [47]putty-tools -- Command-line tools for SSH, SCP, and SFTP.
* [48]pytone -- Music jukebox with advanced features for DJs and a
text-mode user interface.
* [49]qjackctl -- User interface for controlling the JACK sound
server.
* [50]quilt -- Scripts for working with series of patches.
* [51]trang -- Multi-format XML schema converter based on RELAX NG.
33. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/libs/agsync.html
34. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/x11/amule.html
35. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/x11/astats.html
36. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/games/boson.html
37. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/net/cabber.html
38. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/utils/debian-el.html
39. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/devel/dmake.html
40. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/libs/gandalf1.html
41. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/mail/isync.html
42. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/web/jspwiki.html
43. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/kde/juk.html
44. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/interpreters/luasocket.html
45. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/sound/musiclibrarian.html
46. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/editors/nxml-mode.html
47. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/net/putty-tools.html
48. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/sound/pytone.html
49. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/sound/qjackctl.html
50. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/devel/quilt.html
51. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/text/trang.html
Orphaned Packages. 16 packages were orphaned this week and require a
new maintainer. This makes a total of 181 orphaned packages. Many
thanks to the previous maintainers who contributed to the Free
Software community. Please see the [52]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.
52. http://www.debian.org/devel/wnpp/
* [53]aee -- Easy to use screen-based editor. ([54]Bug#216271)
* [55]bmv -- PostScript viewer for SVGAlib. ([56]Bug#216251)
* [57]glbiff -- Program similar to xbiff with a nicer output.
([58]Bug#215847)
* [59]groovycd -- Ncurses based CD player. ([60]Bug#215848)
* [61]juke -- Curses based jukebox program. ([62]Bug#215846)
* [63]libarr -- Small and fast console drawing library.
([64]Bug#215843)
* [65]libctk -- Console Tool Kit. ([66]Bug#215842)
* [67]ljupdate -- Livejournal client for Emacs. ([68]Bug#216273)
* [69]pload -- Program to monitor network device statistics.
([70]Bug#216272)
* [71]smsclient -- Program for sending short messages (SM / SMS)
([72]Bug#216212)
* [73]wmpload -- Windowmaker applet program to monitor network
device stats. ([74]Bug#216274)
* [75]xkbset -- Small utility to change the AccessX settings of
XKEYBOARD. ([76]Bug#216170)
53. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/editors/aee.html
54. http://bugs.debian.org/216271
55. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/text/bmv.html
56. http://bugs.debian.org/216251
57. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/mail/glbiff.html
58. http://bugs.debian.org/215847
59. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/sound/groovycd.html
60. http://bugs.debian.org/215848
61. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/sound/juke.html
62. http://bugs.debian.org/215846
63. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/libs/libarr0.html
64. http://bugs.debian.org/215843
65. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/libs/libctk3.html
66. http://bugs.debian.org/215842
67. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/editors/ljupdate.html
68. http://bugs.debian.org/216273
69. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/net/pload.html
70. http://bugs.debian.org/216272
71. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/comm/smsclient.html
72. http://bugs.debian.org/216212
73. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/net/wmpload.html
74. http://bugs.debian.org/216274
75. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/x11/xkbset.html
76. http://bugs.debian.org/216170
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 [77]contributing
page to find out how to help. We're looking forward to receiving your
mail at [78]dwn@debian.org.
77. http://www.debian.org/News/weekly/contributing
78. mailto:dwn@debian.org
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