Debian Weekly News - April 5th, 2005

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Debian Weekly News
http://www.debian.org/News/weekly/2005/14/
Debian Weekly News - April 5th, 2005
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Welcome to this year's 14th issue of DWN, the weekly newsletter for
the Debian community. A Hurd [1]live CD has recently seen the light
for everybody who would like to give it a try without installing the
system. Noèl Köthe [2]reported during the CeBIT exhibition that some
German government agencies have switched to Debian recently. Kenshi
Muto has [3]recorded an installation of Debian sarge which can be
watched by using telnet.

 1. http://www.superunprivileged.org/
 2. http://news.zdnet.co.uk/software/linuxunix/0,39020390,39191002,00.htm
 3. http://kmuto.jp/b.cgi/2005/03/12#ttyplay

Use the Source, Luke. John Goerzen [4]proposed a source-centric
approach to mitigate the problem of getting all architectures in sync
and to save disk space on the mirrors. Wouter Verhelst [5]pointed out
that one of Debian's key selling points is the fact that you don't
have to wait for something to build before you can use it. The
proposal would turn Debian into a second Gentoo distribution.

 4. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2005/03/msg01387.html
 5. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2005/03/msg01626.html

Why Firewall Support? Thomas Bushnell [6]wondered why the
[7]Vancouver prospectus listed firewall support as an essential
requirement before a port can be supported by a release. Joel Aelwyn
[8]explained that probably the buildd machine needs to be able to run
with a firewall of its own in order to operate in a hostile
environment like the Internet.

 6. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2005/03/msg01713.html
 7. http://www.debian.org/News/weekly/2005/14/X
 8. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2005/03/msg01797.html

Emulating Architectures. Gunnar Wolf [9]proposed to emulate slower
architectures on faster machines by using one of the many emulators in
Debian. Peter De Schrijver [10]added that cross-compiling with
[11]distcc or scratchbox would be even faster while the buildd would
still run on the target architecture and be able to [12]execute newly
created programs.

 9. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2005/03/msg02011.html
 10. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2005/03/msg02013.html
 11. http://packages.debian.org/distcc
 12. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2005/03/msg02018.html

Better Support for chroot Environments. Jorge deLyra [13]proposed to
add better support for chroot environments to init scripts so that
daemons don't get started inside of these. Henning Makholm [14]asked
him to write a proper policy-rc.d script for the chroot environment.
This is documented in /usr/share/doc/sysv-rc/README.policy-rc.d.gz.

 13. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2005/03/msg02511.html
 14. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2005/03/msg02526.html

Supporting LSB init Functions? Thomas Hood [15]wondered if Debian
should adopt the use of LSB init script functions. Javier
Fernández-Sanguino Peña [16]added that currently scripts differ a lot.
Contrary to common belief, the output of init scripts can be logged as
Wouter Verhelst [17]noted.

 15. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2005/03/msg02599.html
 16. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2005/03/msg02640.html
 17. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2005/03/msg02715.html

Reason for Package Removals. Frank Küster [18]wondered how one could
find out the reason why a package was removed from the testing
distribution. Jeroen van Wolffelaar [19]admitted that this information
is indeed not available yet. In the future the new
[20]debian-testing-changes list should be used for such information.

 18. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2005/04/msg00029.html
 19. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2005/04/msg00030.html
 20. http://lists.debian.org/debian-testing-changes/

Major Outage of Debian Infrastructure. James Troup [21]announced major
problems with one of Debian's servers. After it became apparent that
there has been extensive data corruption on one partition the machine
was moved off of the network. Some [22]services have been moved and
restored since then but developers still need to check the files in
their home directories on their own. This also means that this issue
cannot be read on the web when it is distributed via mail.

 21. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2005/04/msg00006.html
 22. http://www.infodrom.org/~joey/log/?200504051921

Release Status Update. Andreas Barth sent in another [23]status update
for the sarge release. He added a last call for volunteers to maintain
the 80386 upgrade path and patch, otherwise this sub-architecture is
bound to be dropped entirely. He also anticipated a soon freeze of
testing once the arm architecture catches up.

 23. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2005/04/msg00003.html

A friendlier Debian Project? Hanna Wallach wrote an [24]essay about
making Debian a friendlier place for both men and women. Surprisingly,
many men participate in the Debian Women project because of a much
more positive, welcoming and friendly atmosphere than in other Debian
fora.

 24. http://www.srcf.ucam.org/~hmw26/join-the-dots/2005/03/30/friendlier-debian/

Helping the GNOME Team. Jordi Mallach [25]asked for help from people
reading, testing and commenting about the validity of the bugs filed
against several GNOME packages. Plain packaging of the software didn't
turn out to be a big problem, except when there are tricky upgrades
and transitions. Coping with the large number of bug reports, though,
is.

 25. http://oskuro.net/blog/freesoftware/helping-debian-gnome-2005-03-12-23-31

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

 * DSA 700: [26]mailreader -- Cross-site scripting vulnerability.
 * DSA 701: [27]samba -- Arbitrary code execution.
 * DSA 702: [28]imagemagick -- Several vulnerabilities.
 * DSA 703: [29]krb5 -- Arbitrary code execution.
 * DSA 704: [30]remstats -- Several vulnerabilities.
 * DSA 705: [31]wu-ftpd -- Denial of service.

 26. http://www.debian.org/security/2005/dsa-700
 27. http://www.debian.org/security/2005/dsa-701
 28. http://www.debian.org/security/2005/dsa-702
 29. http://www.debian.org/security/2005/dsa-703
 30. http://www.debian.org/security/2005/dsa-704
 31. http://www.debian.org/security/2005/dsa-705

New or Noteworthy Packages. The following packages were added to the
unstable Debian archive [32]recently or contain important updates.

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

 * [33]davfs2 -- Mount a WebDAV resource as a regular file system.
 * [34]fapg -- Fast Audio Playlist Generator.
 * [35]gallimimus -- RSS feed storage and generation system.
 * [36]gvr -- Interactive, introductory programming language.
 * [37]lcrash -- Debugger to analyze and debug LKCD kernel crash
   dumps.
 * [38]lhs2tex -- Generates LaTeX code from literate Haskell sources.
 * [39]lnpd -- Daemon for LNP communication with BrickOS.
 * [40]manpages-zh -- Chinese manual pages.
 * [41]moomps -- Modular Object Oriented Multi-Purpose Service.
 * [42]nemesi -- Standards-compliant multimedia streaming client.
 * [43]netmrg -- Network monitoring tool.
 * [44]openmsx -- MSX emulator that aims for perfection.
 * [45]potracegui -- KDE frontend for potrace.
 * [46]rrootage -- Arcade-style space shooting game.
 * [47]stellarium -- Real-time photo-realistic sky generator.
 * [48]tecnoballz -- Breaking block game ported from the Amiga
   platform.
 * [49]textopo -- LaTeX presentation of topology of transmembrane
   proteins.
 * [50]wmaloader -- Firmware downloader for Linksys WMA11B media
   adapter.
 * [51]yate -- Yet Another Telephony Engine.

 33. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/utils/davfs2
 34. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/sound/fapg
 35. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/web/gallimimus
 36. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/games/gvr
 37. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/devel/lcrash
 38. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/text/lhs2tex
 39. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/devel/lnpd
 40. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/doc/manpages-zh
 41. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/admin/moomps
 42. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/graphics/nemesi
 43. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/net/netmrg
 44. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/otherosfs/openmsx
 45. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/graphics/potracegui
 46. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/games/rrootage
 47. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/science/stellarium
 48. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/games/tecnoballz
 49. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/science/textopo
 50. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/net/wmaloader
 51. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/comm/yate

Orphaned Packages. 8 packages were orphaned this week and require a
new maintainer. This makes a total of 224 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]gnome-think -- Hierarchical organiser and outliner.
   ([54]Bug#302261)
 * [55]jaxml -- XML document generation for Python. ([56]Bug#302299)
 * [57]jbofihe -- Lojban glosser/parser. ([58]Bug#302298)
 * [59]kernel-patch-powerpc-2.4.27 -- Linux/PowerPC kernel binary
   image for the powerpc flavour. ([60]Bug#303024)
 * [61]kernel-patch-powerpc-2.6.8 -- Linux kernel image for
   2.6.8-powerpc. ([62]Bug#303021)
 * [63]lojban-common -- Lojban wordlists. ([64]Bug#302297)
 * [65]scanerrlog -- Apache error log parser. ([66]Bug#302300)
 * [67]toshset -- Access much of the Toshiba laptop hardware
   interface. ([68]Bug#301978)

 53. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/gnome/gnome-think
 54. http://bugs.debian.org/302261
 55. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/interpreters/jaxml
 56. http://bugs.debian.org/302299
 57. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/misc/jbofihe
 58. http://bugs.debian.org/302298
 59. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/base/kernel-image-2.4.27-powerpc
 60. http://bugs.debian.org/303024
 61. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/base/kernel-image-2.6.8-powerpc
 62. http://bugs.debian.org/303021
 63. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/misc/lojban-common
 64. http://bugs.debian.org/302297
 65. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/admin/scanerrlog
 66. http://bugs.debian.org/302300
 67. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/utils/toshset
 68. http://bugs.debian.org/301978

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 [69]contributing
page to find out how to help. We're looking forward to receiving your
mail at [70]dwn@debian.org.

 69. http://www.debian.org/News/weekly/contributing
 70. mailto:dwn@debian.org


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