--------------------------------------------------------------------------- Debian Weekly News http://www.debian.org/News/weekly/2002/37/ Debian Weekly News - September 24th, 2002 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Welcome to this year's 37th issue of DWN, the weekly newsletter for the Debian community. The [1]Commission on Intellectual Property Rights released a [2]document that mentions governments and donor organisations in developing countries could review their software procurement policies with a view to giving greater consideration to low cost business software products, including generic and open-source products that are widely available. 1. http://www.iprcommission.org/ 2. http://www.iprcommission.org/text/documents/final_report.htm Bits from the DPL. The Debian Project Leader (DPL) sent his [3]notes again. Bdale Garbee talks about various conferences he was invited to give a talk or hold a workshop, most of them had to do with Debian. Later this month, he will attend the HPWorld convention in Los Angeles and then spend two weekends in a row at AMSAT satellite design meetings in Orlando, Florida, and in Marburg, Germany. 3. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce-0209/msg00003.html Debian Cluster serves as Research Tool. It was [4]reported that a cluster computer consisting of 512 nodes has been set up at [5]Syddansk Universitet (University of Southern Denmark). Researchers will use the cluster to map the pig genome and to do research related to quantum chemistry, solid state physics, and cellular biology. 4. http://newsforge.com/print.pl?sid=02/09/16/1956228 5. http://www.sdu.dk/ Debian Meeting in the UK. Over the weekend of August 31st Debian developers from across the country (and the continent) flocked to Cambridge for the annual festivities of drinking beer, barbecuing and generally geeky chat. Steve McIntyre kindly hosted 25 Debian people and their demands for net connections. A big thanks should go out to Steve and everyone who helped out. Photos of the occasion were taken by [6]Mark Baker and [7]Martin Michlmayr. 6. http://www.photos.mnb.org.uk/2002/debian-cambridge/ 7. http://www.cyrius.com/photos/debian-uk-meet-2002/ Bits from the Release Manager. In addition to the bits from the DPL (see above) Anthony Towns [8]reported about reasons the next Debian release (codename: sarge) will rock for sure. He mentions all great additions that we can expect, like OpenOffice, SE Linux, support for *BSD, Hurd and more architectures as well as internationalised dist-upgrades. Only very few improvements are included already, but the others are likely to be included later. 8. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce-0209/msg00004.html Help for Website Translations. Gerfried Fuchs [9]reported about the status of some translations of [10]www.debian.org. According to the [11]statistics and the corresponding translation coordinator(s) [12]Esperanto, [13]Greek, [14]Finnish and [15]Russian, could use some help. If you are interested and would like to help to make the website more useful for the people in your country who can't read english fluently, please contact one of your [16]translation coordinators. 9. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce-0209/msg00009.html 10. http://www.debian.org/ 11. http://www.debian.org/devel/website/stats/ 12. http://www.debian.org/devel/website/stats/eo.html 13. http://www.debian.org/devel/website/stats/el.html 14. http://www.debian.org/devel/website/stats/fi.html 15. http://www.debian.org/devel/website/stats/ru.html 16. http://www.debian.org/devel/website/translation_coordinators Updating the Release Notes. Robert Bradford is [17]seeking updates for the [18]Release Notes. Three areas where corrections would be beneficial are upgrade instruction improvements, last minute changes to the document and general bugfixing. Documenting noteworthy changes in the Release Notes is also [19]important. These could include different behaviour of some packages as well as non-critical but potentially important bugs in packages that won't be updated in the point-releases. 17. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce-0209/msg00007.html 18. http://www.debian.org/releases/woody/releasenotes 19. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-0209/msg01632.html GNOME Transition in Progress. Last week we [20]reported that the GNOME 2 transition and the associated discussion had unfortunately stagnated. This resulted in a [21]new (and perhaps an [22]old) discussion on the subject. While some of the old conflicts remain, hopefully everyone can work towards the common goal of adding GNOME 2 to the Debian archive. Regardless of our internal problems [23]GNOME 2.0.2 was released. 20. http://www.debian.org/News/weekly/2002/36/ 21. http://lists.debian.org/debian-gtk-gnome-0209/msg00152.html 22. http://lists.debian.org/debian-gtk-gnome-0209/msg00157.html 23. http://www.gnome.org/start/2.0/ Debconf with Charset Encoding Support. Joey Hess [24]announced that Debconf 1.2.0 has experimental support for encoded character sets. He will try to use UTF-8 encoding for everything in the templates files shipped with packages. However if that should not prove to be practical for some languages, it supports other encodings as well. If you are using a different character set, debconf will convert it to the preferred encoding. 24. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-0209/msg01265.html Choosing the Internet Superserver. Marco d'Itri [25]restarted the discussion on how to support more than only the regular inetd program and configuration file, which is done through the update-inetd program from netbase. Anthony Towns explained that the plan hasn't changed and netbase needs to be removed so we can avoid requiring inetd on all systems. update-inetd needs to be rewritten and it's syntax changed to solve a whole bunch of old outstanding bugs. He [26]explained his plan in detail and attached preliminary code. [27]Andrew Suffield also provided preliminary code. 25. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-0209/msg01532.html 26. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-0209/msg01582.html 27. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-0209/msg01580.html Same Package - Two Names. Wichert Akkerman [28]discovered that the Debian archive contains two packages with similar names and descriptions: progsreiserfs and reiserfsprogs. Timshel Knoll, the maintainer of reiserfsprogs [29]explained that the package he maintains uses a library for manipulating ReiserFS partitions. This differs from the upstream source but the library is also used by GNU parted. 28. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-0209/msg01557.html 29. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-0209/msg01603.html SE Linux for Woody. Russell Coker [30]announced that Brian May has taken over woody back-ports of the SE Linux code, so Russel can concentrate on code and packages for sarge now. In his unofficial repository he hosts patched packages for system utilities like dpkg, login and ssh that will work fine with SE Linux but can't be uploaded into the Debian archive. 30. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-0209/msg01568.html Security Updates. You know the drill. Please make sure that you update your systems if you have any of these packages installed. * [31]PHP -- Several vulnerabilities. 31. http://www.debian.org/security/2002/dsa-168 New or Noteworthy Packages. The following packages were added to the Debian archive recently or contain important updates. * [32]anubis -- Processor for outgoing mail. * [33]bochsbios -- BIOS for the Bochs emulator. * [34]cccc -- C and C++ Code Counter, a software metrics tool. * [35]cl-lml -- Lisp Markup Language. * [36]cvsd -- Chroot wrapper to run `cvs pserver' more securely. * [37]daemon -- turns other processes into daemons. * [38]dash -- The Debian Almquist Shell. * [39]dumpasn1 -- ASN.1 object dump program. * [40]fetchyahoo -- Retrieve mail from Yahoo!'s webmail service. * [41]fonty-rg -- Set of fonts for the Linux console. * [42]galeon -- Fast Web Browser for the GNOME Desktop Environment. * [43]masqdialer -- Remote control for shared dialup links. * [44]memtester -- A utility for testing the memory subsystem. * [45]mergeant -- GNOME Database admin tool GUI for GNOME 2. * [46]mozilla-browser -- Sophisticated graphical World-Wide-Web browser. * [47]pbuilder-uml -- user-mode-linux version of pbuilder. * [48]snowdrop -- Plain text watermarking and watermark recovery. * [49]sterilize -- Secure (supposedly) file wipe utility. * [50]tcpreen -- Simple TCP re-engineering tool. * [51]vtk -- Visualization Toolkit - A high level 3D visualization library. 32. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/mail/anubis.html 33. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/misc/bochsbios.html 34. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/devel/cccc.html 35. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/devel/cl-lml.html 36. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/net/cvsd.html 37. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/utils/daemon.html 38. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/shells/dash.html 39. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/utils/dumpasn1.html 40. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/mail/fetchyahoo.html 41. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/utils/fonty-rg.html 42. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/web/galeon.html 43. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/net/masqdialer.html 44. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/utils/memtester.html 45. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/x11/mergeant.html 46. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/web/mozilla-browser.html 47. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/devel/pbuilder-uml.html 48. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/utils/snowdrop.html 49. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/utils/sterilize.html 50. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/net/tcpreen.html 51. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/libs/libvtk4.html Orphaned Packages. 16 packages were orphaned this week and require a new maintainer. This makes a total of 123 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]aria -- Tool to download files from the Internet via HTTP or FTP. ([54]Bug#162054) * [55]check -- A unit test framework for C. ([56]Bug#162082) * [57]efax -- Programs to send and receive fax messages. ([58]Bug#162056) * [59]efax-gtk -- A GTK front-end for the efax package. ([60]Bug#162064) * [61]euler -- An interactive mathematical program. ([62]Bug#162057) * [63]figurine -- An X11 vector graphics drawing program. ([64]Bug#162058) * [65]fpm -- Password Manager. ([66]Bug#160916) * [67]gcdb -- MySQL/PHP billing system. ([68]Bug#161707) * [69]ggradebook -- A Gradebook to help teachers manage student grades. ([70]Bug#162059) * [71]gphone -- X/GTK-based internet telephone.. ([72]Bug#161708) * [73]larswm -- Lars Window Manager with tiled windows. ([74]Bug#161892) * [75]ncftp -- A user-friendly and well-featured FTP client. ([76]Bug#162062) * [77]py-xmlrpc -- Implementation of the XML-RPC protocol for Python. ([78]Bug#161224) * [79]qcl -- A language for quantum computers. ([80]Bug#162060) * [81]wayv -- Experimental hand writing/gesture recognition program. ([82]Bug#162061) * [83]xeuklides -- A program to create euclidean geometry figures. ([84]Bug#162063) 53. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/net/aria.html 54. http://bugs.debian.org/162054 55. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/devel/check.html 56. http://bugs.debian.org/162082 57. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/comm/efax.html 58. http://bugs.debian.org/162056 59. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/comm/efax-gtk.html 60. http://bugs.debian.org/162064 61. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/math/euler.html 62. http://bugs.debian.org/162057 63. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/graphics/figurine.html 64. http://bugs.debian.org/162058 65. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/net/fpm.html 66. http://bugs.debian.org/160916 67. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/web/gcdb.html 68. http://bugs.debian.org/161707 69. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/misc/ggradebook.html 70. http://bugs.debian.org/162059 71. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/sound/gphone.html 72. http://bugs.debian.org/161708 73. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/x11/larswm.html 74. http://bugs.debian.org/161892 75. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/net/ncftp.html 76. http://bugs.debian.org/162062 77. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/interpreters/python-xmlrpc.html 78. http://bugs.debian.org/161224 79. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/interpreters/qcl.html 80. http://bugs.debian.org/162060 81. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/x11/wayv.html 82. http://bugs.debian.org/162061 83. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/math/xeuklides.html 84. http://bugs.debian.org/162063 Want to continue reading DWN? Please help us create this newsletter. Currently, it's mostly a one-man show, which is anticipated to fail in the long term. We urgently need volunteer writers who prepare items. Please see the [85]contributing page to find out how to help. We're looking forward to receiving your mail at [EMAIL PROTECTED] 85. http://www.debian.org/News/weekly/contributing 86. mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
