Debian Weekly News - August 3rd, 2004

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Debian Weekly News
http://www.debian.org/News/weekly/2004/30/
Debian Weekly News - August 3rd, 2004
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Welcome to this year's 30th issue of DWN, the weekly newsletter for
the Debian community. Debian's 11th birthday is near (August 16th),
and, so several partis are planned. Pablo Lorenzzoni [1]announced that
the [2]Brazilian Debian community have postponed the celebrations to
August 21st. Holger Levsen [3]invited all interested bodies to
celebrate on Castle Hohenholz, 100 km north of Berlin and 30 km far
away from Szczecin (Stettin).

 1. http://hackers.propus.com.br/~pablo/blog/?id=34
 2. http://www.debian-br.org/
 3. http://lists.debian.org/debian-events-eu/2004/08/msg00002.html

Improved Debian Developer Packages Overview. Igor Genibel
[4]announced an improved [5]packages overview page.
It now contains links to [6]upstream watch information, [7]excuse
analysis by Björn Stenberg. Information is generally displayed in
UTF-8 as well. Some information can be hidden as well, configured
stateful via cookies.

 4. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2004/07/msg00017.html
 5. http://qa.debian.org/developer.php
 6. http://dehs.alioth.debian.org/
 7. http://bjorn.haxx.se/debian/

Sarge Package Removals. Because of the approaching freeze of sarge,
the [8]debian-release list has seen a flurry of "please remove foo
from sarge" requests. Typically, such packages are still undergoing
extensive upstream development and are not yet ready for a stable
release. Steve Langasek [9]asked that such requests be accompanied by
a release critical bug report with details on why the package should
not be included in sarge.

 8. http://lists.debian.org/debian-release/
 9. http://lists.debian.org/debian-release/2004/07/msg00107.html

OSCON Talks Jay Lyman [10]reviewed talks given by three Debian
developers at this year's [11]O'Reilly Open Source Conference. Bdale
Garbee spoke about community development and noted that people are
surprised when something comes from amateurs because not many people
recognise what they can do. Jeff Licquia described Progeny's model of
componentised GNU/Linux. Jeff Waugh discussed the future of GNOME.

 10. http://www.newsforge.com/article.pl?sid=04/07/30/1436242
 11. http://conferences.oreillynet.com/os2004/

New RFH Tag for orphaned Packages. Frank Lichtenheld [12]announced a
new "request for help" tag for the [13]Work Needed and Prospective
Packages for [14]packages. This tag is meant for situations in which
the current maintainer wants to continue maintaining the package, but
needs some help to do this, because his time is limited or the package
is quite big and needs several maintainers.

 12. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2004/08/msg00000.html
 13. http://www.debian.org/devel/wnpp/
 14. http://www.debian.org/devel/wnpp/help_requested

Sarge Release Timeline. Steve Langasek posted another [15]release
update. There are still several major bugs in the base system that are
being worked on. With the base system frozen, CD images of
[16]debian-installer release candidate 1 will be made available within
a day or two afterward. On August 8th official security support for
sarge is said to begin with the number of release critical bugs
dropped by 100. The timeline predicts them to drop to zero on
September 1st, followed by the relase on September 15th.

 15. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2004/08/msg00001.html
 16. http://www.debian.org/devel/debian-installer/

New Debian GNU/Hurd Installation Method. Michael Banck has
[17]announced a new installation method for the Debian [18]GNU/Hurd
port. It uses the [19]xattr-hurd support for ext2 by Roland McGrath
[20]mentioned earlier. Using his [21]kernel patch and [22]star, one
can extract a [23]base tarball and get a working Debian GNU/Hurd
system immediately.

 17. http://lists.debian.org/debian-hurd/2004/08/msg00006.html
 18. http://www.debian.org/ports/hurd/
 19. http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-hurd/2004-02/msg00108.html
 20. http://www.debian.org/News/weekly/2004/10/
 21. http://people.debian.org/~mbanck/xattr-hurd/kernel-patch-xattr-hurd_20040302-3_all.deb
 22. http://packages.debian.org/testing/utils/star
 23. http://people.debian.org/~mbanck/xattr-hurd/gnu-latest.tar.bz2

Status of GNOME 2.6 in Sarge. Jordi Mallach wrote an [24]update on
GNOME 2.6 in sarge. [25]gnome-applets and a number of other less
important packages depending on [26]libgtop2 has finally made it into
testing. The only two remaining packages that keep the metapackages
for GNOME 2.6 out of testing are [27]eog and [28]gnome-games. The
latter package will take a while since it is affected by several
release transitions currently ongoing.

 24. http://oskuro.net/blog/freesoftware/gnome-2.6-sarge-2004-08-03-02-18
 25. http://packages.debian.org/gnome-applets
 26. http://packages.debian.org/libgtop2
 27. http://packages.debian.org/eog
 28. http://packages.debian.org/gnome-games

Bug Squashing Parties. With the release of sarge coming closer and
closer, bug squashing parties become more important in order to reduce
the number of release critical bug reports and to stabilise the
[29]debian-installer. Martin Zobel-Helas [30]announced a bug squashing
party from August 20th to 22nd in Darmstadt, Germany. Debian people
from Europe and Germany are invited to participate this event.

 29. http://www.debian.org/devel/debian-installer/
 30. http://lists.debian.org/debian-events-eu/2004/07/msg00113.html

Versioning and Stabilising of Debtags. Enrico Zini [31]wondered how he
should handle the libraries for debtags properly. The debtags codebase
is getting fairly stable and I'm planning to release version 1.0.
Andrew Suffield [32]asserted that no shared libraries should be
uploaded for binary interfaces (ABI) that are not yet stable enough.
Enrico would also appreciate people to help him with packaging.

 31. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2004/08/msg00007.html
 32. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2004/08/msg00020.html

Introducing Debian Lieutenants? Glenn McGrath [33]wondered if the
Debian project needs a structural change, and maybe Lieutenants who
would be located between the project leader and maintainers. He
asserted that Debian is more a "team of champions" than a "champion
team" and that it is difficult to change something which does not lay
within one's own responsibility.

 33. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2004/08/msg00054.html

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

 * [34]squirrelmail -- Multiple vulnerabilities.

 34. http://www.debian.org/security/2004/dsa-535

New or Noteworthy Packages. The following packages were added to the
unstable Debian archive [35]recently or contain important updates.

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

 * [36]akregator -- RSS feed aggregator for KDE.
 * [37]caspar -- Makefile snippets for common tasks.
 * [38]cvs-mailcommit -- Send CVS commitments via mail.
 * [39]dtach -- Emulates the detach feature of screen.
 * [40]fillets-ng -- Puzzle game about witty fish saving the world
   sokoban style.
 * [41]matchbox-desktop -- Desktop application launcher for
   resource-limited systems.
 * [42]pathogen -- Puzzle game about matching 3D model structures.
 * [43]pgpool -- Connection pool server for PostgreSQL.
 * [44]yapps2 -- Yet Another Python Parser System.

 36. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/web/akregator
 37. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/devel/caspar
 38. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/utils/cvs-mailcommit
 39. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/misc/dtach
 40. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/games/fillets-ng
 41. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/embedded/matchbox-desktop
 42. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/games/pathogen
 43. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/misc/pgpool
 44. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/python/yapps2

Debian Packages introduced last Week. Every day, a different Debian
package is [45]featured from the testing distribution. If you know
about an obscure package you think others should also know about, send
it to [46]Andrew Sweger. Debian package a day introduced the following
packages last week.

 45. http://www.livejournal.com/users/debaday/
 46. http://www.livejournal.com/userinfo.bml?user=debaday

 * [47]dirvish -- Filesystem based backup system using rsync.
 * [48]sipcalc -- Advanced console-based ip subnet calculator.
 * [49]ipsc -- IP Subnet Calculator for console.
 * [50]intuitively -- Automatic IP configuration detection for
   laptops.
 * [51]mimms -- MMS (mms://) streaming media download utility

 47. http://www.livejournal.com/users/debaday/26274.html
 48. http://www.livejournal.com/users/debaday/26514.html
 49. http://www.livejournal.com/users/debaday/26834.html
 50. http://www.livejournal.com/users/debaday/26987.html
 51. http://www.livejournal.com/users/debaday/27157.html

Orphaned Packages. 11 packages were orphaned this week and require a
new maintainer. This makes a total of 177 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]fftw -- Library for computing Fast Fourier Transforms.
   ([54]Bug#263126)
 * [55]fftw3 -- Library for computing Fast Fourier Transforms.
   ([56]Bug#263125)
 * [57]gwrapguile -- G-wrap: Tool for exporting C libraries into
   Scheme interpreters. ([58]Bug#263127)
 * [59]k6fftwgel -- Library for computing Fast Fourier Transforms on
   AMD K6-2. ([60]Bug#263131)
 * [61]k7fftwgel -- Library for computing Fast Fourier Transforms on
   AMD K7. ([62]Bug#263132)
 * [63]libofx -- Development package for libofx0. ([64]Bug#263129)
 * [65]mmake -- Makefile generator for Java programs.
   ([66]Bug#261581)
 * [67]modemu -- Telnet services for communication programs.
   ([68]Bug#261585)
 * [69]p4fftwgel -- Library for computing Fast Fourier Transforms on
   Intel P4. ([70]Bug#263133)
 * [71]photopc -- Interface to digital still cameras.
   ([72]Bug#261681)
 * [73]rdiff-backup -- Backup program to use deltas for history.
   ([74]Bug#261578)

 53. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/libs/fftw2
 54. http://bugs.debian.org/263126
 55. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/libs/fftw3
 56. http://bugs.debian.org/263125
 57. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/libs/libgwrapguile1
 58. http://bugs.debian.org/263127
 59. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/libs/k6fftwgel2
 60. http://bugs.debian.org/263131
 61. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/libs/k7fftwgel2
 62. http://bugs.debian.org/263132
 63. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/libs/libofx0c102
 64. http://bugs.debian.org/263129
 65. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/devel/mmake
 66. http://bugs.debian.org/261581
 67. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/net/modemu
 68. http://bugs.debian.org/261585
 69. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/libs/p4fftwgel2
 70. http://bugs.debian.org/263133
 71. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/graphics/photopc
 72. http://bugs.debian.org/261681
 73. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/utils/rdiff-backup
 74. http://bugs.debian.org/261578

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 [75]contributing
page to find out how to help. We're looking forward to receiving your
mail at [76]dwn@debian.org.

 75. http://www.debian.org/News/weekly/contributing
 76. mailto:dwn@debian.org


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