Debian Weekly News - February 17th, 2004

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Debian Weekly News
http://www.debian.org/News/weekly/2004/07/
Debian Weekly News - February 17th, 2004
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Welcome to this year's seventh issue of DWN, the weekly newsletter for
the Debian community. The [1]debian-desktop sub-project has
[2]announced an IRC meeting on Wednesday, February 25th. Andrea
Mennucc [3]conducted several Google searches and found out that
Debian is ranked in the middle field of popular distributions. Pablo
Lorenzzoni also [4]announced that [5]registration for this years'
Debian conference has opened.

 1. http://www.debian.org/devel/debian-desktop/
 2. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-0402/msg01029.html
 3. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-0402/msg00420.html
 4. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce-0402/msg00003....
 5. http://www.debconf.org/debconf4/register/

New ftp-master Machine. James Troup [6]announced that [7]ftp-master
has been moved to a more powerful and better connected machine
(newraff, a HP DL380, donated by [8]HP), which has always been a long
term plan. Therefore access to the host auric is not restricted
anymore, opening an upload queue that is accessible via SSH.

 6. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce-0401/msg00011....
 7. http://ftp-master.debian.org/
 8. http://www.hp.com/

Project Leader Nominations. Manoj Srivastava [9]announced that
nominations for the upcoming project leader elections takes place
until February 28th, followed by campaigning until March 20th. The
election will take place from March 20th to April 10th. Prospective
leaders should be familiar with the constitution. Nominations should
be sent to [10]debian-vote and cryptographically signed.

 9. http://lists.debian.org/debian-vote-0402/msg00002.html
 10. http://lists.debian.org/debian-vote/

Using LDAP for Name Resolution. Torsten Landschoff prepared this
[11]how-to on using LDAP for name resolution. It explains how to
install the OpenLDAP server on a Debian system, and how to set up
OpenLDAP for use as an accounts database with [12]libnss-ldap and
[13]libpam-ldap. Markus Amersdorfer also wrote an [14]article about
using OpenLDAP on Debian woody to serve GNU/Linux and Samba users.

 11. http://people.debian.org/~torsten/ldapnss.html
 12. http://packages.debian.org/libnss-ldap
 13. http://packages.debian.org/libpam-ldap
 14. http://aqua.subnet.at/~max/ldap/

JavaScript Libraries. Sebastian Ley [15]noticed that Debian ships at
least two different JavaScript libraries: [16]libsmjs from
spidermonkey and [17]libjs from [18]NJS. Renaming a library causes
problems for packages linking to it. However, one library doesn't
[19]use a library name (soname) from upstream. Both libraries
[20]provide the same functionality but a different programming
interface.

 15. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-0402/msg00215.html
 16. http://packages.debian.org/libsmjs1
 17. http://packages.debian.org/libjs0
 18. http://www.njs-javascript.org/
 19. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-0402/msg00230.html
 20. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-0402/msg00231.html

Translatable debconf Templates. Christian Perrier [21]announced the
[22]list of old-style debconf string techniques by Martin Quinson. The
listed packages don't use [23]po-debconf for debconf templates. Denis
Barbier [24]noted that if maintainers provide a templates.pot file,
they will receive a French translation quite quickly.

 21. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-0402/msg00251.html
 22. http://graal.ens-lyon.fr/~mquinson/debian/switch/
 23. http://packages.debian.org/po-debconf
 24. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-0402/msg00266.html

Why Linux, Why Debian? Manoj Srivastava wanted to [25]solicit opinions
towards this subject. He knows why he chose Debian and Linux but was
asked to give a talk for a technical audience and wanted to deliver a
talk with a broader perspective. He would like to cover why one would
want to select GNU/Linux over the BSD's, and why one would want to
select Debian over the other distributions.

 25. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-0402/msg00594.html

How to make a Port official. John Goerzen [26]wondered what it takes a
port to qualify an official Debian port. Anthony Towns [27]explained
that currently porters need to wait until mirroring is segmented to
support more architectures. To be considered a release candidate, the
port should generally have a buildd which is integrated into
[28]buildd.debian.org and consistently reach at least the 85 % mark,
have a developer accessible machine online and should have
[29]debian-installer working.

 26. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-0402/msg00606.html
 27. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-0402/msg00615.html
 28. http://buildd.debian.org/
 29. http://www.debian.org/devel/debian-installer/

Experimental NTP 4 Packages. Matthias Urlichs [30]announced that he
has uploaded [31]NTP 4.2.0 to experimental, finishing some package
reorganisation. He also [32]explained that most users either run their
own NTP network and need to do hand-edit /etc/ntp.conf anyway or can
happily use pool.ntp.org as their NTP server, which is the new
default.

 30. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-0402/msg00771.html
 31. http://packages.debian.org/ntp
 32. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-0402/msg00787.html

Wasteful Packaging. Steve McIntyre [33]noticed that large [34]amounts
of data files in /usr/share are contained in regular binary packages.
Instead they should be split out into common packages that all the
architecture specific packages can depend on. Putting this data into
all binary packages impacts on disk space and bandwidth, both for
central servers and all the poor mirror admins out there.

 33. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-0402/msg00781.html
 34. http://people.debian.org/~93sam/waste.txt

Custom Debian Distributions. Petter Reinholdtsen [35]asked for help
with [36]custom Debian distributions. The [37]Debian-Edu sub-project
believes that using debconf with proper defaults is the only sensible
way that all [38]custom distributions can benefit. Thomas Viehmann
[39]added that [40]debconf is not intended as a way to store stuff,
especially if the package maintainer believes that sensible defaults
are shipped with the package.

 35. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-0402/msg00801.html
 36. http://wiki.debian.net/index.cgi?CustomDebian
 37. http://www.skolelinux.org/
 38. http://wiki.debian.net/index.cgi?CustomDebianManifesto
 39. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-0402/msg00821.html
 40. http://packages.debian.org/debconf

New DELAYED Upload Queue. Tollef Fog Heen [41]announced a new delayed
upload system in his home directory on gluck. For a fairly recent
version of [42]dput he also provided a configuration snippet. Uploads
can be removed by the uploader and superseded by an upload with a
higher version number.

 41. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-0402/msg00888.html
 42. http://packages.debian.org/dput

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

 * [43]mpg123 -- Heap overflow.
 * [44]mailman -- Several vulnerabilities.
 * [45]cgiemail -- Open mail relay.

 43. http://www.debian.org/security/2004/dsa-435
 44. http://www.debian.org/security/2004/dsa-436
 45. http://www.debian.org/security/2004/dsa-437

New or Noteworthy Packages. The following packages were added to the
unstable Debian archive [46]recently or contain important updates.

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

 * [47]audiolink -- Makes managing and searching for music easier.
 * [48]clusterssh -- Administer multiple ssh or rsh shells
   simultaneously.
 * [49]emcast -- Multicast toolkit.
 * [50]emelfm -- File manager for X/GTK.
 * [51]exiftran -- Transform digital camera jpeg images.
 * [52]fig2sxd -- Convert xfig files to OpenOffice.org format.
 * [53]gcalctool -- GTK+ 2.0 desktop calculator.
 * [54]hal -- Hardware Abstraction Layer.
 * [55]lmodern -- Scalable PostScript fonts for European character
   sets.
 * [56]logwatch -- Log analyzer with nice output written in Perl.
 * [57]memtest86+ -- Thorough real-mode memory tester.
 * [58]rss2email -- Receive RSS feeds by email.
 * [59]shaketracker -- MIDI sequencer with tracker GUI.
 * [60]tdiary-mode -- TDiary editing mode for Emacsen.
 * [61]tdom -- XML/DOM/XPath/XSLT implementation for Tcl.
 * [62]timemachine -- JACK audio recorder for spontaneous and
   conservatory use.
 * [63]tnftp -- The enhanced FTP client.
 * [64]treecc -- Manages code generation for compiler development.
 * [65]xdebconfigurator -- Script used with debconf to autoconfigure
   xserver-xfree86.
 * [66]zonecheck -- DNS configuration checker.

 47. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/sound/audiolink
 48. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/admin/clusterssh
 49. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/net/emcast
 50. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/utils/emelfm
 51. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/graphics/exiftran
 52. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/graphics/fig2sxd
 53. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/math/gcalctool
 54. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/admin/hal
 55. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/tex/lmodern
 56. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/admin/logwatch
 57. [url=http://packages.debian.org/unstable/misc/memtest86 ]http://packages.debian.org/unstable/misc/memtest86 [/url]
 58. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/mail/rss2email
 59. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/sound/shaketracker
 60. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/web/tdiary-mode
 61. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/interpreters/tdom
 62. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/sound/timemachine
 63. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/net/tnftp
 64. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/devel/treecc
 65. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/x11/xdebconfigurator
 66. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/net/zonecheck

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


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