Debian Weekly News - October 25th, 2005

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Debian Weekly News
http://www.debian.org/News/weekly/2005/43/
Debian Weekly News - October 25th, 2005
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 Jörg Jaspert [1]noticed that the rate of
package [2]rejections out of the NEW queue is rising, mostly due to
incomplete copyright files and suggested to investigate the included
files before the upload. Debian users in Japan will hold Debian
[3]mini conference in Osaka, Japan at the coming weekend (28th and
29th of October).

 1. http://ganneff.de/blog/2005/10/23
 2. http://ftp-master.debian.org/REJECT-FAQ.html
 3. http://www.debian.org/events/2005/1028-jdmc

Etch Release Progress. Steve Langasek [4]thanked those who have spent
large amounts of time on the [5]sarge release and proposed a timeline
for the release of [6]etch. This allows for the first freeze of the
toolchain and kernel in July and a general freeze in October. Meeting
these milestones would then lead to a [7]release of etch in December
2006.

 4. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2005/10/msg00004.html
 5. http://www.debian.org/releases/sarge/
 6. http://www.debian.org/releases/etch/
 7. http://release.debian.org/etch_rc_policy.txt

Graphical Debian-Installer. Christian Perrier [8]reported about the
[9]graphical frontend to the [10]debian-installer as part of the most
recent [11]minutes of the monthly Debian Installer team [12]meeting.
Davide Viti earlier [13]announced a nearly working graphical installer
and a small [14]ISO image for trial.

 8. http://lists.debian.org/debian-boot/2005/10/msg00980.html
 9. https://debian.polito.it/downloads/d-i_gtk_snapshots/
 10. http://www.debian.org/devel/debian-installer/
 11. http://people.debian.org/~bubulle/d-i/irc-meeting-20051019/minutes
 12. http://wiki.debian.org/DebianInstallerMeetings
 13. http://lists.debian.org/debian-boot/2005/10/msg00406.html
 14. http://people.debian.org/~fjp/d-i/images/daily/gtk-miniiso/mini.iso

Port Assignments during System Boot. Gernot Salzer [15]noticed that
some network ports get assigned dynamically during the boot process
and sometimes clash with daemons that use fixed ports. Javier
Fernández-Sanguino Peña [16]explained that the assignment happens
inside the GNU C library and [17]started the portsreserve package to
prevent such cases.

 15. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2005/09/msg01062.html
 16. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2005/09/msg01071.html
 17. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2005/09/msg01148.html

Default local Hostname. Christoph Haas [18]discovered that the local
hostname after the installation defaults to localhost.localdomain
instead of just localhost. Joey Hess [19]explained that the
configuration has already been changed after the sarge release in
reaction to Bug#[20]247734.

 18. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2005/09/msg01063.html
 19. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2005/10/msg00254.html
 20. http://bugs.debian.org/247734

Plus Signs in Package Names. Andres Salomon [21]intended to rename the
binary packages of [22]mysql++ package from [23]libsqlplus1 to
[24]libmysql++ since several users were confused by the older name and
wondered if the plus signs could pose a problem for the packaging
tools. Henning Glawe [25]pointed out that the plus sign has a special
meaning for apt-get but Henning Makholm [26]added that this doesn't
matter here since the soname will have to be added to it anyway.

 21. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2005/09/msg01290.html
 22. http://packages.debian.org/src:mysql++
 23. http://packages.debian.org/libsqlplus1
 24. http://packages.debian.org/libmysql++2
 25. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2005/10/msg00081.html
 26. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2005/10/msg00083.html

S-Lang Module Naming. Rafael Laboissiere [27]noted that there is
currently no policy about naming S-Lang modules. Applications such as
[28]slsh or [29]slrn are prefixed with "sl" while modules for other
languages use the full name of the language in the package name. He
[30]acknowledged to rename the package to [31]slang-gdbm as this
module is more interesting for S-Lang developers.

 27. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2005/09/msg01291.html
 28. http://packages.debian.org/slsh
 29. http://packages.debian.org/slrn
 30. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2005/09/msg01309.html
 31. http://packages.debian.org/slang-gdbm

Pbuilder Status Update. Junichi Uekawa [32]reported that he has moved
the development to [33]Alioth as a preparation for team maintenance
and switched to [34]cdebootstrap. For several distributions
dependencies are not [35]resolved with regards to priorities, though.
They could be adjusted [36]en bloc or [37]during the entire
development cycle before the release.

 32. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2005/09/msg01317.html
 33. http://alioth.debian.org/projects/pbuilder
 34. http://packages.debian.org/cdebootstrap
 35. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2005/09/msg01450.html
 36. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2005/10/msg00035.html
 37. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2005/10/msg00052.html

Proposed teTeX Transition. Frank Küster [38]wondered if there is a
possibility to prevent a normal transition for teTeX packages since
the new version 3.0 should be available in unstable but release
managers have asked him not to start another transition at the moment.
Andreas Barth [39]agreed that providing the old library version for a
while would help and not block packages as usual.

 38. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2005/09/msg01349.html
 39. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2005/09/msg01353.html

New uClibc Ports. Daniel Ruoso is [40]interested in an i386 port of
Debian based on the uClibc instead of the GNU C library for older and
slower hardware. Simon Richter is in [41]need of a big endian ARM port
using uClibc for embedded systems and proposed to exchange only a
small set of packages with their uClibc versions. Riku Voipio
[42]pointed to the [43]woody port using uClibc.

 40. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2005/09/msg01362.html
 41. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2005/09/msg01367.html
 42. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2005/09/msg01449.html
 43. http://people.debian.org/~andersee/uwoody/

cURL Status Update. Domenico Andreoli [44]updated the cURL package in
the experimental suite so that one variant is linked against OpenSSL
and another is linked against GNU TLS. This will fix license problems
with applications released under the [45]GNU GPL that are indirectly
linked against OpenSSL.

 44. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2005/09/msg01389.html
 45. http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html

PHP License for PEAR Packages? Piotr Roszatycki [46]wondered how to
handle packages in the Debian archive that use the [47]PHP [48]license
for something that is not PHP itself since one such package was
rejected from the archive. Jörg Jaspert [49]pointed out that the
license isn't suited for modules and applications written in or for
PHP but only for the core PHP language itself.

 46. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2005/10/msg00122.html
 47. http://www.php.net/license/2_02.txt
 48. http://www.php.net/license/3_0.txt
 49. http://lists.debian.org/debian-legal/2005/08/msg00128.html

New Source Packages and Binaries. Frank Küster [50]noticed that a new
source package that provides existing binary package does not have to
go through NEW processing. This way accidently overwritten binary
packages won't get noticed before they reach the archive. Jeroen van
Wolffelaar [51]explained that this will soon change.

 50. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2005/10/msg00153.html
 51. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2005/10/msg00187.html

Security Updates. You know the drill. Please make sure that you update
your systems if you have any of these packages installed.

 * DSA 866: [52]mozilla -- Several vulnerabilities.
 * DSA 867: [53]module-assistant -- Insecure temporary file.
 * DSA 868: [54]mozilla-thunderbird -- Several vulnerabilities.
 * DSA 869: [55]eric -- Arbitrary code execution.
 * DSA 870: [56]sudo -- Arbitrary command execution.
 * DSA 871: [57]libgda2 -- Arbitrary code execution.

 52. http://www.debian.org/security/2005/dsa-866
 53. http://www.debian.org/security/2005/dsa-867
 54. http://www.debian.org/security/2005/dsa-868
 55. http://www.debian.org/security/2005/dsa-869
 56. http://www.debian.org/security/2005/dsa-870
 57. http://www.debian.org/security/2005/dsa-871

New or Noteworthy Packages. The following packages were added to the
unstable Debian archive [58]recently or contain important updates.

 58. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/newpkg_main

 * [59]acpidump -- Utilities to dump system's ACPI tables to an ASCII
   file.
 * [60]adplay -- Console-based OPL2 audio player.
 * [61]araneida -- Programmable web server written and extended in
   Lisp.
 * [62]bbe -- Sed-like editor for binary files.
 * [63]bcp -- Tool for extracting subsets of Boost C++ Libraries.
 * [64]dmraid -- Tool to manage some hardware (S)ATA raid
   controllers.
 * [65]hunspell -- Spell checker and morphological analyser
   (program).
 * [66]jmp -- Profiler for Java to trace object and method timings.
 * [67]kgeography -- Geography learning tool.
 * [68]lcd4linux -- Grabs information and displays it on an external
   lcd.
 * [69]sextractor -- Source extractor for astronomical images.
 * [70]soundconverter -- Convert sound files to other formats.
 * [71]ssss -- Shamir's secret sharing scheme implementation.
 * [72]tix -- Tix library for Tk, version 8.1 -- runtime package.
 * [73]wxmaxima -- wxWidgets GUI for the computer algebra system
   maxima.
 * [74]xmoto -- 2D motocross platform game.

 59. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/admin/acpidump
 60. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/sound/adplay
 61. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/web/araneida
 62. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/editors/bbe
 63. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/libdevel/bcp
 64. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/admin/dmraid
 65. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/text/hunspell
 66. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/devel/jmp
 67. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/kde/kgeography
 68. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/utils/lcd4linux
 69. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/science/sextractor
 70. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/gnome/soundconverter
 71. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/utils/ssss
 72. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/libs/tix
 73. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/math/wxmaxima
 74. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/games/xmoto

Orphaned Packages. 7 packages were orphaned this week and require a
new maintainer. This makes a total of 204 orphaned packages. Many
thanks to the previous maintainers who contributed to the Free
Software community. Please see the [75]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.

 75. http://www.debian.org/devel/wnpp/

 * [76]dcgui -- Direct connect graphical client (GTK+) (peer-based
   file-sharing). ([77]Bug#334492)
 * [78]dctc -- Direct connect text client. ([79]Bug#334488)
 * [80]goldedplus -- Offline mail reader for Fidonet and Usenet.
   ([81]Bug#334743)
 * [82]juke -- Curses-based jukebox program. ([83]Bug#334375)
 * [84]jwhois -- Improved caching Whois client. ([85]Bug#334543)
 * [86]tspc -- Client to configure an IPv6 tunnel to freenet6.
   ([87]Bug#335095)
 * [88]xmms-crossfade -- XMMS Plugin for crossfading / continuous
   output. ([89]Bug#335091)

 76. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/gnome/dcgui
 77. http://bugs.debian.org/334492
 78. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/net/dctc
 79. http://bugs.debian.org/334488
 80. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/mail/goldedplus
 81. http://bugs.debian.org/334743
 82. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/sound/juke
 83. http://bugs.debian.org/334375
 84. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/net/jwhois
 85. http://bugs.debian.org/334543
 86. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/net/tspc
 87. http://bugs.debian.org/335095
 88. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/sound/xmms-crossfade
 89. http://bugs.debian.org/335091

Removed Packages. 2 packages have been [90]removed from the Debian
archive during the past week:

 90. http://ftp-master.debian.org/removals.txt

 * di-packages-build -- Helper packages for Debian-Installer packages
   build
   [91]Bug#334148: Request of maintainer, superseded by debhelper;
   no rev-build-deps
 * lg-* -- Linux Gazette packages
   [92]Bug#321795: Request of maintainer, non-free license

 91. http://bugs.debian.org/334148
 92. http://bugs.debian.org/321795

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 93. http://www.debian.org/News/weekly/contributing
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