Debian Weekly News - June 14th, 2005

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Debian Weekly News
http://www.debian.org/News/weekly/2005/24/
Debian Weekly News - June 14th, 2005
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Welcome to this year's 24th issue of DWN, the weekly newsletter for
the Debian community. Last week has seen a lot of discussion on
release goals and the release team for etch. Several people are
already keen on discussing the preparation and timing for the next
release. Branden Robinson [1]explained where news about [2]Alioth
should be sent to instead of using private mail.

 1. http://lists.debian.org/debian-project/2005/05/msg00092.html
 2. http://alioth.debian.org/

Release Policy Changes. Andreas Barth [3]proposed a few changes to
the release policy for the upcoming release of etch. When libraries
are provided, other programs should link against them dynamically
instead of duplicating its source, build-dependencies must be static.
The section about PIC libraries probably needs a technical discussion
first.

 3. http://lists.debian.org/debian-release/2005/06/msg00157.html

C++ ABI Changes. Matthias Klose [4]announced that the application
binary interface (ABI) for C++ will be changed in unstable. All
packages that contain shared libraries written in C++ will have to be
renamed. After that, all packages that depend on these need to be
uploaded again. Therefore unstable is frozen with regards to C++
libraries.

 4. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2005/06/msg00004.html

Scheduling Talks for DebConf 5. Don Armstrong [5]called for [6]votes
on the talks people would like to listen to at the upcoming [7]Debian
Conference in Helsinki, Finnland. In order to reduce the likelihood
that two talks that people really wish to attend are scheduled for the
exact same time, the scheduler will attempt to minimise the conflicts
between talks according to the vote.

 5. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2005/06/msg00007.html
 6. http://comas.linux-aktivaattori.org/debconf5/attendees/account/voting/
 7. http://www.debian.org/events/2005/0710-debconf

Sarge for AMD64 released. Jörg Jaspert [8]announced that the AMD64
archive is declared stable as well. In general this release is the
same as for the official [9]ports in Debian, with only a few modified
packages and several [10]removed. Security Support for this release is
planned to be provided by the Debian Security Team via
[11]security.debian.org.

 8. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2005/06/msg00005.html
 9. http://www.debian.org/ports/
 10. http://amd64.debian.net/docs/package_changes.txt
 11. http://www.debian.org/security/

Debian for the Geeks. Bruce Byfield has written a [12]review of the
new Debian release. He acknowledges the benefits the new [13]installer
brings and that this release uses current versions of many packages.
However, [14]aptitude doesn't seem to be a particularly easy program
and several video cards were not detected automatically.

 12. http://os.newsforge.com/os/05/06/10/1512236.shtml?tid=2
 13. http://www.debian.org/devel/debian-installer/
 14. http://packages.debian.org/aptitude

Development of dpkg. Scott James Remnant [15]reported that the current
development branch 1.13 of [16]dpkg has been uploaded into unstable.
The new version contains improved handling of architectures,
especially for splitting the cpu architecture and the underlying
operating system kernel. The values for several variables have been
changed to reflect reality better, but has the potential to break
existing build scripts.

 15. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2005/06/msg00010.html
 16. http://packages.debian.org/dpkg

Proficiency-level for Debian Packages? Mark Edgington [17]wondered if
it would be useful to add a field to the package description
indicating the minimum proficiency level that a user should have in
order for a package to be useful. Enrico Zini [18]thought about this
as well but admitted, that it is difficult to measure "easyness"
universally.

 17. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2005/05/msg01443.html
 18. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2005/06/msg00205.html

Debian Package Customisation. Roberto Sanchez [19]announced his
[20]howto about the customisation of Debian packages. The document
starts with setting up [21]pbuilder for building the customised
packages and explains how to create a new package version by adding a
new changelog entry.

 19. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2005/06/msg00238.html
 20. http://familiasanchez.net/~sanchezr/?page=debcustomize
 21. http://packages.debian.org/pbuilder

Debian and SELinux. Luke Leighton [22]wondered if there has been any
progress turning the library [23]libselinux1 into a required package.
Stephen Frost [24]explained that it's working the other way round and
that e.g. [25]coreutils needs to add a dependency itself. Petter
Reinholdtsen [26]added that using a library does not mean using
SELinux.

 22. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2005/06/msg00465.html
 23. http://packages.debian.org/libselinux1
 24. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2005/06/msg00468.html
 25. http://packages.debian.org/coreutils
 26. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2005/06/msg00735.html

New or Noteworthy Packages. The following packages were added to the
unstable Debian archive [27]recently or contain important updates.

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

 * [28]cpp-4.0 -- The GNU C preprocessor.
 * [29]g++-4.0 -- The GNU C++ compiler.
 * [30]gcc-4.0 -- The GNU C compiler.
 * [31]gcj-4.0 -- The GNU compiler for Java(TM).
 * [32]gfortran-4.0 -- The GNU Fortran 95 compiler.
 * [33]gij-4.0 -- The GNU Java bytecode interpreter.
 * [34]gnat-4.0 -- The GNU Ada compiler.
 * [35]gnome-menus -- Implementation of the freedesktop menu
   specification for GNOME.
 * [36]gobjc-4.0 -- The GNU Objective-C compiler.
 * [37]postgresql-8.0 -- Object-relational SQL database, version 8.0
   server.
 * [38]tomboy -- desktop note taking program using Wiki style links.
 * [39]treelang-4.0 -- The GNU Treelang compiler.

 28. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/interpreters/cpp-4.0
 29. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/devel/g++-4.0
 30. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/devel/gcc-4.0
 31. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/devel/gcj-4.0
 32. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/devel/gfortran-4.0
 33. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/devel/gij-4.0
 34. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/devel/gnat-4.0
 35. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/gnome/gnome-menus
 36. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/devel/gobjc-4.0
 37. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/misc/postgresql-8.0
 38. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/gnome/tomboy
 39. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/devel/treelang-4.0

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 [40]contributing
page to find out how to help. We're looking forward to receiving your
mail at [41]dwn@debian.org.

 40. http://www.debian.org/News/weekly/contributing
 41. mailto:dwn@debian.org


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