Debian Weekly News - December 28th, 2004

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Debian Weekly News
http://www.debian.org/News/weekly/2004/51/
Debian Weekly News - December 28th, 2004
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Welcome to this year's 51st issue of DWN, the weekly newsletter for
the Debian community. Piotr Roszatycki [1]reported that he has created
preliminary packages for PHP5 already. We would like to thank all
contributors and translators of this online resource who have helped
provide high quality information to our readers. We are seeking more
contributions in order to be able to maintain DWN in 2005 as well.

 1. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2004/12/msg01992.html

51 Issues of DWN produced this Year. You are currently reading the
51st issue, which means that this is also the 51st week of gathering
information on interesting activities in the Debian community, writing
items, proofreading and translating. Even though the English version
is prepared only by a small group of people, many more people are
involved before you can read the issue. Each issue is sent to
proofreaders, and translators also improve it. Each issue is also
translated into several other languages simultaneously.

Documenting transitional Packages. Javier Fernández-Sanguino Peña
[2]investigated the archive in order to provide a list in the
[3]Release Notes that can tell users which packages in woody have
been renamed or moved in sarge and can be safely removed after an
upgrade. This information was part of the [4]documentation for woody
already.

 2. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2004/12/msg01589.html
 3. http://www.debian.org/releases/stable/releasenotes
 4. http://www.debian.org/releases/woody/i386/release-notes/ch-appendix

Limiting the Number of Mails. Osamu Aoki [5]proposed to limit the
number of mails per user per mailing-list in order to help reduce the
noise in discussions. Colin Watson [6]pointed out that lists need to
be treated differently. He would rather like to see more lists
moderated, and the moderators given power to stop threads after they
have become off-topic.

 5. http://lists.debian.org/debian-project/2004/12/msg00237.html
 6. http://lists.debian.org/debian-project/2004/12/msg00242.html

Depending on a real RSH Client. Wolfgang Borgert [7]discovered a
problem in an unofficial Debian package. Due to the use of an older
embedded system the package depends on a real rsh client. Since the
package [8]ssh provides an rsh-client, adding a dependency to this is
not sufficient. Wouter Verhelst and Miquel van Smoorenburg [9]pointed
[10]out that a versioned dependency will do the trick, since it can
only be resolved by a real package.

 7. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2004/12/msg02104.html
 8. http://packages.debian.org/ssh
 9. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2004/12/msg02105.html
 10. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2004/12/msg02106.html

Individual Package Optimisation. Julien Danjou [11]translated a short
French [12]article about [13]apt-build by Julien Reveret into
[14]English. This package intends to mitigate the alleged advantage
Gentoo has over Debian with regards to optimised packages. It makes it
easy for interested user to recompile Debian packages with different
compiler options.

 11. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2004/12/msg02107.html
 12. http://shaddai.nerim.net/apt-build/
 13. http://packages.debian.org/apt-build
 14. http://julien.danjou.info/article-apt-build.html

Volatile Status Update. Andreas Barth sent in another [15]status
update about the volatile archive and reported that it is ready to
have packages uploaded. New packages should be discussed on
[16]debian-devel first and always include the original source archive.
He mentioned the general rules for this archive as well.

 15. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2004/12/msg02138.html
 16. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/

Legal Issues with the (L)GPL. Michael K. Edwards [17]forwarded three
issues. He wondered if the [18]GNU General Public License (GPL) is
more an offer than a contract, if it is violated when the source code
is unobtainable and whether a vendor of non-free software can require
users to particular versions of libraries released under the [19]LGPL.
Nathanael Nerode [20]tried to answer these questions.

 17. http://lists.debian.org/debian-legal/2004/12/msg00209.html
 18. http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html
 19. http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/lgpl.html
 20. http://lists.debian.org/debian-legal/2004/12/msg00220.html

MIA Database Coding Request. Jeroen van Wolffelaar [21]asked for help
with coding up some extra features in the [22]mia database management
in Python. Basically he would like to be able to add configurable
delays and hints on a per-maintainer basis for the MIA (missing in
action) tools.

 21. http://lists.debian.org/debian-qa/2004/12/msg00023.html
 22. http://cvs.debian.org/mia/?cvsroot=qa

New Entities for the Installation Manual. Frans Pop [23]proposed to
introduce more SGML entities for the new installation manual. This
would ensure that the same terms and spelling would be used in all
places of the manual and in all translations.

 23. http://lists.debian.org/debian-boot/2004/12/msg00973.html

Release Notes Translations needed. Rob Bradford [24]called for
translators for the [25]release notes for the upcoming release of
sarge. Several replied and committed to translating the document into
their own language. New translations should be sent to the
[26]debian-doc list.

 24. http://lists.debian.org/debian-i18n/2004/12/msg00029.html
 25. http://cvs.debian.org/ddp/manuals.sgml/release-notes/?cvsroot=debian-doc
 26. http://lists.debian.org/debian-doc/

Preparations for Stable Update. The next [27]stable update is being
[28]prepared and expected before New Year's eve. It will consist only
of corrections for about the last 60 security problems that the
security team addressed and fixed with [29]advisories. This update
will get the woody release in sync with the latest security updates.

 27. http://lists.debian.org/debian-release/2004/12/msg00183.html
 28. http://people.debian.org/~joey/3.0r4/
 29. http://www.debian.org/security/

Rewriting GFDL Documentation. Frank Küster [30]wondered if it was
possible to rewrite the GNU Emacs manual starting with an older
version since it has recently been released under the [31]GNU Free
Documentation License (GFDL) which has been [32]considered
(preliminary) non-free by Debian. Florian Weimer [33]pointed out that
even the Emacs 18 manual contained a permission notice that honoured
invariant sections.

 30. http://lists.debian.org/debian-project/2004/12/msg00232.html
 31. http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html
 32. http://people.debian.org/~srivasta/Position_Statement.xhtml
 33. http://lists.debian.org/debian-project/2004/12/msg00234.html

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

 * DSA 615: [34]debmake -- Insecure temporary directories.
 * DSA 616: [35]netkit-telnet-ssl -- Arbitrary code execution.
 * DSA 617: [36]tiff -- Arbitrary code execution.
 * DSA 618: [37]imlib -- Arbitrary code execution.

 34. http://www.debian.org/security/2004/dsa-615
 35. http://www.debian.org/security/2004/dsa-616
 36. http://www.debian.org/security/2004/dsa-617
 37. http://www.debian.org/security/2004/dsa-618

New or Noteworthy Packages. The following packages were added to the
unstable Debian archive [38]recently or contain important updates.

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

 * [39]asterisk-chan-capi -- Common ISDN API 2.0 implementation for
   Asterisk.
 * [40]asterisk-config -- Config files for asterisk.
 * [41]tspc -- Client to configure an IPv6 tunnel to freenet6.

 39. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/comm/asterisk-chan-capi
 40. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/comm/asterisk-config
 41. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/net/tspc

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 [42]contributing
page to find out how to help. We're looking forward to receiving your
mail at [43]dwn@debian.org.

 42. http://www.debian.org/News/weekly/contributing
 43. mailto:dwn@debian.org


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