--------------------------------------------------------------------------- Debian Weekly News http://www.debian.org/News/weekly/2003/42/ Debian Weekly News - October 21st, 2003 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
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 [EMAIL PROTECTED] 77. http://www.debian.org/News/weekly/contributing 78. mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
