Debian Weekly News - September 26th, 2006

Posted by Scott_Ruecker on Sep 27, 2006 12:04 AM EDT
Debian.org; By Martin Schulze
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Welcome to this year's 39th issue of DWN, the weekly newsletter for the Debian community. Jeroen van Wolffelaar announced a bug squashing party to be held in Utrecht, The Netherlands, from September 29th to October 1st. Manoj Srivastava announced that the general resolution on asset handling has passed. As Debian experiments with funding, the author of DWN is going to experiment with spending less time on Debian. Please understand that due to this there may be no future issues of DWN in the current form or that they will only be released less frequently.

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Debian Weekly News
http://www.debian.org/News/weekly/2006/39/
Debian Weekly News - September 26th, 2006
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Welcome to this year's 39th issue of DWN, the weekly newsletter for the Debian community. Jeroen van Wolffelaar [1]announced a bug squashing party to be held in Utrecht, The Netherlands, from September 29th to October 1st. Manoj Srivastava [2]announced that the general resolution on asset handling has passed. As Debian [3]experiments with funding, the author of DWN is going to experiment with spending less time on Debian. Please understand that due to this there may be no future issues of DWN in the current form or that they will only be released less frequently.

1. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2006/09/msg00013.html 2. http://lists.debian.org/debian-vote/2006/09/msg00439.html 3. http://www.computerworld.com.au/index.php/id;1964607233;fp;2;fpid;1

Distributing DVD CSS from http://ftp.skolelinux.org? Petter Reinholdtsen [4]wondered if libdvdcss2 could be distributed from [5]ftp.skolelinux.org as there is no DMCA law in Norway. Holger Levsen [6]stated that users in countries other then Norway might get into legal problems if this is done, and asked for legal advice. Alexander Schmehl [7]pointed him to Gregory Pomerantz, the legal advisor of [8]SPI.

4. http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu/2006/09/msg00079.html 5. http://ftp.skolelinux.org/ 6. http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu/2006/09/msg00091.html 7. http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu/2006/09/msg00133.html 8. http://www.spi-inc.org/

Filibustering General Resolutions. Manoj Srivastava [9]reported that due to a loop hole in the [10]constitution, any group of 6 Debian developers can delay any general resolution indefinitely by putting up their own amendment. Due to past accusations he has decided that stopping this could be seen as abuse of his secretary powers and asked the project to determine how it wants to handle filibustering.

9. http://lists.debian.org/debian-vote/2006/09/msg00251.html 10. http://www.debian.org/devel/constitution

City of Munich migrates to Debian. The City of Munich [11]announced (German only) that they have started migrating their desktops to a Debian-based computing platform. As part of the project called [12]LiMux nearly 14,000 computers will be running a distribution based on [13]sarge accompanied by more recent versions of popular productivity tools like KDE, OpenOffice.org and others.

11. http://www.muenchen.de/Rathaus/dir/limux/ueberblick/175149/windowsabloesung.html 12. http://www.muenchen.de/Rathaus/dir/limux/english/147197/ 13. http://www.debian.org/releases/sarge/

Debian experiments with Funding. Howard Dahdah [14]reported that Debian experiments with funding the release managers to release [15]etch in time as previously announced. However, technically this is not the Debian project but this is how it is publicly received. [16]Several [17]developers [18]are [19]not happy with the [20]Dunc-Tank and have raised concerns before it went public already.

14. http://www.computerworld.com.au/index.php/id;1964607233;fp;2;fpid;1 15. http://www.debian.org/releases/etch/ 16. http://www.infodrom.org/~joey/log/?200609232000 17. http://layer-acht.org/blog/debian/#1-37 18. http://julien.danjou.info/blog/index.php/2006/09/20/334-my-way-to-have-etch-released-on-time 19. http://lists.debian.org/debian-vote/2006/09/msg00446.html 20. http://www.dunc-tank.org/

Project Leader to be recalled? Denis Barbier [21]proposed a general resolution to recall the [22]project leader in order to remove any confusion whether the Debian project leader is involved in [23]Dunc-Tank or not. The Computerworld [24]article reported that Debian is experimenting while Dunc-Tank is officially outside of Debian. So it already failed to be seen as a separate entity.

21. http://lists.debian.org/debian-vote/2006/09/msg00267.html 22. http://www.debian.org/devel/leader 23. http://www.dunc-tank.org/about.html 24. http://www.computerworld.com.au/index.php/id;1964607233;fp;4194304;fpid;1

Procedural Rules about General Resolutions. Manoj Srivastava [25]announced procedural rulings about proposing and sponsoring general resolutions due to the high number of such resolutions and amendments. Every proposal must clearly indicate the bounds of the proposal and every proposal and sponsoring email must be signed with the cryptographic key that lives in the Debian keyrings.

25. http://lists.debian.org/debian-vote/2006/09/msg00297.html

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

* DSA 1181: [26]gzip -- Arbitrary code execution. * DSA 1182: [27]gnutls11 -- RSA signature forgery cryptographic weakness. * DSA 1183: [28]Linux 2.4.27 -- Several vulnerabilities. * DSA 1184: [29]Linux 2.6.8 -- Several vulnerabilities.

26. http://www.debian.org/security/2006/dsa-1181 27. http://www.debian.org/security/2006/dsa-1182 28. http://www.debian.org/security/2006/dsa-1183 29. http://www.debian.org/security/2006/dsa-1184

New or Noteworthy Packages. The following packages were added to the unstable Debian archive [30]recently or contain important updates.

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

* [31]astronomical-almanac -- Astronomical almanac - calculate planet and star positions. * [32]broffice.org -- BrOffice.org office suite (version 2.0). * [33]dcl -- GNU Enterprise - Double Choco Latte. * [34]diakonos -- Customisable, usable console-based text editor. * [35]gnash -- Free Flash movie player. * [36]ipset -- Administration tool and iptables modules for kernel IP sets. * [37]keyjnote -- PDF presentation tool with eye candies. * [38]klash -- Free Flash movie player. * [39]psi3 -- Quantum Chemical Program Suite. * [40]qwik -- Group communication system with Wiki and ML. * [41]strongswan -- IPSec utilities for strongSwan. * [42]update-inetd -- Update tool for inetd.conf.

31. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/science/astronomical-almanac 32. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/editors/broffice.org 33. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/web/dcl 34. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/text/diakonos 35. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/utils/gnash 36. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/net/ipset 37. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/x11/keyjnote 38. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/utils/klash 39. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/science/psi3 40. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/web/qwik 41. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/net/strongswan 42. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/admin/update-inetd

Orphaned Packages. 7 packages were orphaned this week and require a new maintainer. This makes a total of 306 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. To find out which orphaned packages are installed on your system the wnpp-alert program from devscripts may be helpful.

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

* [44]feta -- Simpler interface to APT, dpkg, and other package tools. ([45]Bug#388363) * [46]pathological -- Puzzle game involving paths and marbles. ([47]Bug#388358) * [48]pathological-music -- Puzzle game involving paths and marbles. ([49]Bug#388359) * [50]tkcon -- Enhanced interactive console for developing in Tcl. ([51]Bug#388520) * [52]uligo -- Tsumego (go problems) practice tool. ([53]Bug#388362) * [54]zope-docfindereverywhere -- Find documentation for a Zope product using a doc tab. ([55]Bug#389312) * [56]zope-docfindertab -- Find documentation for a Zope product using a doc tab. ([57]Bug#389313)

44. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/admin/feta 45. http://bugs.debian.org/388363 46. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/games/pathological 47. http://bugs.debian.org/388358 48. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/games/pathological-music 49. http://bugs.debian.org/388359 50. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/interpreters/tkcon 51. http://bugs.debian.org/388520 52. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/games/uligo 53. http://bugs.debian.org/388362 54. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/web/zope-docfindereverywhere 55. http://bugs.debian.org/389312 56. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/web/zope-docfindertab 57. http://bugs.debian.org/389313

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 [58]contributing page to find out how to help. We're looking forward to receiving your mail at [59]dwn@debian.org.

58. http://www.debian.org/News/weekly/contributing 59. mailto:dwn@debian.org

This issue of Debian Weekly News was edited by Martin Zobel-Helas, Sebastian Feltel and Martin 'Joey' Schulze.

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