Debian Weekly News - May 9th, 2006

Posted by dcparris on May 9, 2006 10:22 PM EDT
Mailing list; By Martin Schulze
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Welcome to this year's 19th issue of DWN, the weekly newsletter for the Debian community. Uwe Hermann [1]investigated changelog files and recognised a number of interesting release names for packages. Several Debian developers gather in Oaxtepec, Mexico, where this year's [2]Debian Conference will take place and is preceded by a working camp that already started.

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Debian Weekly News
http://www.debian.org/News/weekly/2006/19/
Debian Weekly News - May 9th, 2006
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Welcome to this year's 19th issue of DWN, the weekly newsletter for the Debian community. Uwe Hermann [1]investigated changelog files and recognised a number of interesting release names for packages. Several Debian developers gather in Oaxtepec, Mexico, where this year's [2]Debian Conference will take place and is preceded by a working camp that already started.

1. http://www.hermann-uwe.de/blog/debian-packages-release-names 2. http://www.debian.org/events/2006/0514-debconf

Unified Terminology for Distribution Names. Christian Perrier [3]reported on a discussion on the [4]debian-l10n-french mailing-list covering different terminology in various Debian documents referring to stable, sarge, 3.1 etc. He [5]proposed to use distribution to refer to the Debian distribution in general and suite when talking about stable, testing etc., using release for release names and version when referring to the version numbers.

3. http://lists.debian.org/debian-project/2006/05/msg00000.html 4. http://lists.debian.org/debian-l10n-french/ 5. http://lists.debian.org/debian-project/2006/05/msg00122.html

Moving irc.debian.org. Steve McIntyre [6]asked if it would be useful to move the irc.debian.org alias away from the [7]Freenode network to the [8]OFTC network, which is a supported project of [9]SPI and hosts IRC channels for a lot of open source projects. Steve's intention was seconded by a number of developers. This move would have the advantage that all Debian related IRC channels could be concentrated on one IRC network. Paul Johnson [10]asked if it would be better to move to a Jabber-based network instead of IRC.

6. http://lists.debian.org/debian-project/2006/04/msg00333.html 7. http://www.freenode.net/ 8. http://www.oftc.net/oftc/ 9. http://www.spi-inc.org/ 10. http://lists.debian.org/debian-project/2006/04/msg00342.html

Etch Release Update. Andreas Barth [11]confirmed the timeline to release [12]etch in December. He stated that the [13]ARM port qualifies as a release architecture again and that the list of release architectures are not finalised and will be re-evaluated twice before the release. The kernel that will be used still needs to be decided upon. More release assistants will help keep the release on track.

11. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2006/05/msg00000.html 12. http://www.debian.org/releases/etch/ 13. http://www.debian.org/ports/arm/

Tracking forwarded bugs in the BTS. Pierre Habouzit [14]announced the creation of a new service called [15]bts-link. It allows Debian Maintainers to follow the status of the bugs they forward to their upstream's bug tracking systems directly in the Debian BTS. As of now, it supports [16]Bugzilla (which is used by KDE, Gnome, X.org, GCC, Mozilla and others), [17]Trac (used by VideoLAN) and [18]Savannah. [19]Sourceforge's bug tracking system shall follow.

14. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2006/05/msg00001.html 15. http://svn.debian.org/wsvn/bts-link/trunk/ 16. http://www.bugzilla.org/ 17. http://www.edgewall.com/trac/ 18. http://savannah.gnu.org/ 19. http://www.sourceforge.net/

Automating new Debian Installations with Preseeding. A new [20]document describes the technique of doing unattended Debian installations with preseeding. The preseed file contains answers to all [21]debconf questions asked during the installation. Its generation is explained in the article. The file's location may be given as a path or a URL.

20. http://www.debian-administration.org/articles/394 21. http://packages.debian.org/debconf

Debian participates in the Summer of Code. The Debian project [22]announced its participation in Google's [23]Summer of Code. More than 50 development [24]tasks related to Debian cover general improvements, quality assurance, releasing and testing the distribution, package management, new applications, security, infrastructure and the improvement of particular packages. Students and the mentoring organisation will receive funding after the tasks have been worked on.

22. http://www.debian.org/News/2006/20060508 23. http://code.google.com/soc/ 24. http://wiki.debian.org/SummerOfCode2006

Wiki Development. Petter Reinholdtsen [25]reported about his efforts to write Wiki pages with [26]OpenOffice.org which is done with the help of a [27]macro set that converts an OpenOffice.org document into MoinMoin syntax. Later he [28]reported successful PDF generation from the Wiki page by exporting the contents as DocBook XML.

25. http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu/2006/04/msg00157.html 26. http://packages.debian.org/openoffice.org 27. http://ooowiki.de/Writer2MoinMoin 28. http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu/2006/05/msg00017.html

Maintainer's Karma revived. Gürkan Sengün was missing the old karma page from Dirk Eddelbüttel and the package status page by Takuo Kitame. To fill the gap he has [29]created a new overview [30]page combining both. This service is hosted on the GNU/kFreeBSD porter [31]machine, kindly provided by Aurelien Jarno.

29. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2006/04/msg00840.html 30. http://io.debian.net/~tar/bugstats/ 31. http://io.debian.net/

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

* DSA 1050: [32]clamav -- Denial of service or arbitrary code execution. * DSA 1051: [33]mozilla-thunderbird -- Several vulnerabilities. * DSA 1052: [34]cgiirc -- Arbitrary code execution. * DSA 1053: [35]mozilla -- Arbitrary code execution. * DSA 1054: [36]tiff -- Denial of service and arbitrary code execution.

32. http://www.debian.org/security/2006/dsa-1050 33. http://www.debian.org/security/2006/dsa-1051 34. http://www.debian.org/security/2006/dsa-1052 35. http://www.debian.org/security/2006/dsa-1053 36. http://www.debian.org/security/2006/dsa-1054

New or Noteworthy Packages. The following packages were added to the unstable Debian archive [37]recently or contain important updates.

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

* [38]btscanner -- Ncurses-based scanner for Bluetooth devices. * [39]derivations -- Book: Derivations of Applied Mathematics. * [40]gbindadmin -- GTK+ configuration tool for bind9. * [41]ikiwiki -- Wiki compiler. * [42]wammu -- Phone manager.

38. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/net/btscanner 39. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/doc/derivations 40. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/admin/gbindadmin 41. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/web/ikiwiki 42. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/comm/wammu

Orphaned Packages. 6 packages were orphaned this week and require a new maintainer. This makes a total of 302 orphaned packages. Many thanks to the previous maintainers who contributed to the Free Software community. Please see the [43]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.

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

* [44]f-prot-installer -- F-Prot(tm) Antivirus installer package. ([45]Bug#364731) * [46]galternatives -- Graphical setup tool for the alternatives system. ([47]Bug#365365) * [48]gnobog -- GNOME Bookmarks Organiser. ([49]Bug#366013) * [50]qtorrent -- Graphical BitTorrent client using Qt 3.x. ([51]Bug#365959) * [52]rtlinux -- Real-Time-Linux, a POSIX-compatible hard realtime operating system. ([53]Bug#365717) * [54]svn-arch-mirror -- One-way mirroring from Subversion to Arch revision control. ([55]Bug#364859)

44. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/utils/f-prot-installer 45. http://bugs.debian.org/364731 46. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/admin/galternatives 47. http://bugs.debian.org/365365 48. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/gnome/gnobog 49. http://bugs.debian.org/366013 50. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/net/qtorrent 51. http://bugs.debian.org/365959 52. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/devel/rtlinux 53. http://bugs.debian.org/365717 54. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/devel/svn-arch-mirror 55. http://bugs.debian.org/364859

Removed Packages. 10 packages have been [56]removed from the Debian archive during the past week:

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

* xmms-alarm-bmp1 -- BMP general plugin using beep-media-player as an alarm clock work [57]Bug#272859: Request of QA, has never been part of a stable release, RC-buggy, superseded by bmp-alarm. * doc-linux-sv -- Linux HOWTOs in Swedish - HTML version [58]Bug#273702: Request of QA, orphaned, very very outdated. * libdb2-ruby -- Interface to Berkeley DB for Ruby 1.6 [59]Bug#344725: Request of Maintainer, depends on obsolete db2. * libtest-builder-tester-perl -- Helper testing library for Test::Builder tests [60]Bug#353134: Request of Maintainer, superseded by libtest-simple-perl. * xpcd -- PhotoCD tool collection: Base [61]Bug#357014: Request of Maintainer, orphaned; dead upstream. * postgresql-8.0 -- Object-relational SQL database, version 8.0 server [62]Bug#363963: Request of Maintainer, superseded by postgresql-8.1. * kernel-patch-2.4-preempt -- Reduces the latency of the Linux kernel [63]Bug#361161: Request of Maintainer, deprecated due to requiring 2.4 kernel. * zope2.7 -- Open Source Web Application Server [64]Bug#362283: Request of Maintainer, superseded by zope2. * devfsd -- Daemon for the device file system [65]Bug#363402: Request of Maintainer, obsolete. * mozilla-thunderbird -- Mozilla Thunderbird standalone mail client [66]Bug#363270: Request of Maintainer, superseded by thunderbird.

57. http://bugs.debian.org/272859 58. http://bugs.debian.org/273702 59. http://bugs.debian.org/344725 60. http://bugs.debian.org/353134 61. http://bugs.debian.org/357014 62. http://bugs.debian.org/363963 63. http://bugs.debian.org/361161 64. http://bugs.debian.org/362283 65. http://bugs.debian.org/363402 66. http://bugs.debian.org/363270

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 [67]contributing page to find out how to help. We're looking forward to receiving your mail at [68]dwn@debian.org.

67. http://www.debian.org/News/weekly/contributing 68. mailto:dwn@debian.org

This issue of Debian Weekly News was edited by Sebastian Feltel, Mohammed Adnène Trojette and Martin 'Joey' Schulze.

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