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Welcome to this year's 17th issue of DWN, the weekly newsletter for the Debian community. According to analyst house IDC, Free Software is gaining ground in Europe, as one third of mid-to-large sized companies in Europe report significant use of a Free Software database management system. The leadership team had its first meeting whilst this issue was being prepared.
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Debian Weekly News
http://www.debian.org/News/weekly/2005/17/
Debian Weekly News - April 26th, 2005
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Welcome to this year's 17th issue of DWN, the weekly newsletter for
the Debian community. According to analyst house IDC, Free Software is
[1]gaining ground in Europe, as one third of mid-to-large sized
companies in Europe report significant use of a Free Software database
management system. The [2]leadership team had its first meeting
whilst this issue was being prepared.
1. http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/04/18/oss_gains_in_europe/
2. http://lists.debian.org/debian-project/2005/04/msg00324.html
GNOME 2.10 uploaded into Experimental. Jordi Mallach [3]reported that
most of the pieces of the 2.10 puzzle have been uploaded into the
experimental distribution and many people are already using it. Since
newer versions of a few libraries are needed they were temporarily
packaged by the GNOME team and uploaded to their own repository until
newer versions make it into Debian.
3. http://oskuro.net/blog/freesoftware/gnome-2.10-experimental-2005-04-18-18-37
GFDL and Debian. Matthew Garrett [4]explained in a discussion about
the [5]GNU Free Documentation License that Debian wants freedom for
everybody. Matthew Wilcox [6]drafted the Debian Free Documentation
[7]Guidelines that define slightly different goals or freedoms for
documentation than for software.
4. http://lists.debian.org/debian-project/2005/04/msg00108.html
5. http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html
6. http://lists.debian.org/debian-project/2005/04/msg00127.html
7. http://people.debian.org/~willy/dfdocg-0.4.txt
User Poll: Remove non-free Documentation? Brian Nelson [8]conducted a
poll on whether to [9]remove all [10]GNU FDL-licensed documentation.
He has [11]published the [12]results and emphasised some textual
[13]answers that several users gave. Only a few people have
[14]participated in this survey, though. The majority of them don't
want those documents removed entirely but for many it is ok to move
them into non-free.
8. http://lists.debian.org/debian-user/2005/04/msg01851.html
9. http://people.debian.org/~srivasta/Position_Statement.xhtml
10. http://www.gnu.org/licenses/fdl.html
11. http://lists.debian.org/debian-project/2005/04/msg00238.html
12. http://people.debian.org/~pyro/fdl_poll_results.txt
13. http://people.debian.org/~pyro/fdl_poll.mail
14. http://lists.debian.org/debian-project/2005/04/msg00272.html
Debian Day Call for Papers. Alexander Schmehl [15]called for talk
submissions for this year's [16]Debian day, a one day conference for
and by Debian developers and affiliates. It will take place on
Thursday, 23rd of June during the [17]LinuxTag conference and
exhibition in Karlsruhe, Germany. The audience for the Debian Day is
expected to mostly consist of experienced users and developers.
Interested speakers should drop [18]him a note.
15. http://blog.schmehl.info/2005/04/21#CfP-Debian-Day
16. http://www.infodrom.org/Debian/events/LinuxTag2005/day.html
17. http://www.debian.org/events/2005/0622-linuxtag
18. mailto:alexander@schmehl.info
Debian and mplayer FAQ. MJ Ray [19]announced a draft [20]FAQ covering
the situation of [21]mplayer in the Debian distribution. The document
summarises former discussions on the debian-legal list on this topic.
He also explains that a new version has been uploaded and awaits
ftpmaster approval and that all questionable code has been removed.
19. http://lists.debian.org/debian-legal/2005/04/msg00454.html
20. http://people.debian.org/~mjr/mplayer.html
21. http://www.debian.org/News/weekly/2005/17/www.mplayerhq.hu/
Debian AMD64 Meeting. A Debian AMD64 porters IRC meeting took place on
April, 23th where the main topic of discussion was the unofficial
release of the AMD64 port for sarge and the move from [22]Alioth to a
new machine with more disk space. Several people have been assigned
tasks for the upcoming release. The new machine will be hosted at the
[23]University of Darmstadt. A [24]summary and the [25]IRC log are
available.
22. http://alioth.debian.org/
23. http://www.tu-darmstadt.de/
24. http://debian-amd64.alioth.debian.org/irc-summary.txt
25. http://debian-amd64.alioth.debian.org/irc-log.txt
New Debian Consultants Policy. The Debian consultants team has
published the new [26]policy for additions to the [27]consultants web
page. A working e-mail address is now required by policy for all
listed consultants and those who haven't provided one should contact
the [28]consultants team and update their record.
26. http://lists.debian.org/debian-project/2005/04/msg00096.html
27. http://www.debian.org/consultants/#policy
28. mailto:consultants@debian.org
Debian Project Leader Report. Branden Robinson [29]sent in his first
project leader [30]report in which he talks about sarge release
issues, the ARM buildds, Debian assets around the world, interviews he
gave, and more. Other issues were a backup site for [31]snapshots and
a more comprehensive backup strategy for machines critical to Debian's
infrastructure.
29. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2005/04/msg00019.html
30. http://people.debian.org/~branden/dpl/reports/2005-04-24.html
31. http://snapshot.debian.net/
One Year Debian Employment. Joey Hess sent in a [32]summary about the
past year in which he was employed by SLX Debian Labs to work on
debian-edu. He compared the items on his todo list with the work
actually done, which boils down to a lot of work towards the release
of sarge. Additionally, he just [33]moved his installer test farm into
a remote rack.
32. http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu/2005/04/msg00131.html
33. http://kitenet.net/~joey/blog/entry/moving-2005-04-25-01-23.html
Importance of the Snapshot Service. Adrian van Bidder [34]wondered if
the [35]snapshot service shouldn't be promoted to an official
debian.org service in recognition of its value to the project. Martin
Schulze [36]explained that it has been very helpful for security work
when older package versions have had to be reviewed.
34. http://lists.debian.org/debian-project/2005/04/msg00327.html
35. http://snapshot.debian.net/
36. http://lists.debian.org/debian-project/2005/04/msg00333.html
AMD64 Port Status. Andreas Jochens [37]tried to build the current
testing distribution for the AMD64 architecture from scratch which
took only about one week on a standard single processor EM64T-P4 box.
This was very promising since almost all packages build on this
architecture without problems using the pristine Debian sarge sources.
37. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2005/04/msg00884.html
Security Updates. You know the drill. Please make sure that you update
your systems if you have any of these packages installed.
* DSA 713: [38]junkbuster -- Several vulnerabilities.
* DSA 714: [39]kdelibs -- Arbitrary code execution.
38. http://www.debian.org/security/2005/dsa-713
39. http://www.debian.org/security/2005/dsa-714
New or Noteworthy Packages. The following packages were added to the
unstable Debian archive [40]recently or contain important updates.
40. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/newpkg_main
* [41]aoetools -- Tools to assist in using ATA over Ethernet.
* [42]cldump -- Clarion database files extractor.
* [43]darcs-buildpackage -- Suite to help with Debian packages in
Darcs archives.
* [44]gonzui -- Source code search engine.
* [45]kstart -- Kerberos kinit variant supporting ticket refreshing.
* [46]mnemo2 -- Notes/memos component for Horde Framework.
* [47]pypanel -- Lightweight panel/taskbar for X11 window managers.
* [48]redland-utils -- Redland Resource Description Framwork (RDF)
Utility programs.
* [49]remctl -- Remote Kerberos-authenticated command execution.
* [50]saidar -- Curses-based program which displays live system
statistics.
* [51]sdate -- Never ending September date.
* [52]sidentd -- Authenticate to network services via S/Ident.
* [53]statgrab -- Sysctl-style access to system statistics.
* [54]tinywm -- Tiny Window Manager.
* [55]velocity -- Java-based template engine for web application.
41. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/admin/aoetools
42. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/misc/cldump
43. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/devel/darcs-buildpackage
44. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/devel/gonzui
45. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/net/kstart
46. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/web/mnemo2
47. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/x11/pypanel
48. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/text/redland-utils
49. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/net/remctl
50. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/utils/saidar
51. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/utils/sdate
52. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/net/sidentd
53. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/utils/statgrab
54. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/x11/tinywm
55. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/web/velocity
Orphaned Packages. 7 packages were orphaned this week and require a
new maintainer. This makes a total of 228 orphaned packages. Many
thanks to the previous maintainers who contributed to the Free
Software community. Please see the [56]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.
56. http://www.debian.org/devel/wnpp/
* [57]cscvs -- System for integrating CVS repositories into Arch
archives. ([58]Bug#305462)
* [59]haskelldb -- Haskell library for expressing database queries.
([60]Bug#305460)
* [61]inform-mode -- Emacs mode for editing Inform files.
([62]Bug#305463)
* [63]perl4caml -- Use Perl code in OCaml programs, runtime library.
([64]Bug#305456)
* [65]pycaml -- OCaml bindings to embed Python interpreter and
objects. ([66]Bug#305455)
* [67]scsiadd -- Add or remove SCSI devices by rescanning the bus.
([68]Bug#306008)
* [69]tla-tools -- Utilities to make life with GNU Arch (tla)
easier. ([70]Bug#305452)
57. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/devel/cscvs
58. http://bugs.debian.org/305462
59. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/devel/haskelldb-bin
60. http://bugs.debian.org/305460
61. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/editors/inform-mode
62. http://bugs.debian.org/305463
63. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/libs/libperl4caml-ocaml
64. http://bugs.debian.org/305456
65. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/libdevel/pycaml
66. http://bugs.debian.org/305455
67. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/admin/scsiadd
68. http://bugs.debian.org/306008
69. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/devel/tla-tools
70. http://bugs.debian.org/305452
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 [71]contributing
page to find out how to help. We're looking forward to receiving your
mail at [72]dwn@debian.org.
71. http://www.debian.org/News/weekly/contributing
72. mailto:dwn@debian.org
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