Debian Weekly News - June 27th, 2006

--------------------------------------------------------------------------- Debian Weekly News http://www.debian.org/News/weekly/2006/26/ Debian Weekly News - June 27th, 2006 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------

Welcome to this year's 26th issue of DWN, the weekly newsletter for the Debian community. Alan Baghumian [1]announced a [2]new version of [3]Parsix a special Debian-based live and installation CD with Persian support. Joey Schulze [4]reported that an [5]RSS feed for the [6]weekly news is generated automatically, including translations for the current issue.

1. http://lists.parsix.org/?0::737 2. http://lists.parsix.org/?0::803 3. http://www.parsix.org/ 4. http://lists.debian.org/debian-www/2006/06/msg00238.html 5. http://www.debian.org/News/weekly/dwn.en.rdf 6. http://www.debian.org/News/weekly/

Debian Query Language. Berke Durak from the French National [7]Institute for Research in Computer Science and Control is [8]seeking feedback and ideas for defining a query language that would be useful to maintainers, power-users and researchers. They have already developed a [9]dependency checker based on boolean form. Tools for handling the Debian meta data with its evolution in time are also being implemented.

7. http://www.inria.fr/ 8. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2006/05/msg01912.html 9. http://bugs.debian.org/365087

Date of last Modification. Kai Hendry [10]noted that policy's date [11]field is poorly implemented on /var/lib/dpkg/available. Relying instead on the changelog date for package activity can sometimes be incorrect as some developers may not update the date on their final change [12]accordingly. Joey Hess stepped in and [13]recommended the use of dch -r to update the changelog timestamp when continuing work on packages.

10. http://lists.debian.org/debian-policy/2006/06/msg00070.html 11. http://www.debian.org/doc/debian-policy/ch-controlfields.html#s-f-Date 12. http://lists.debian.org/debian-policy/2006/06/msg00033.html 13. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2006/06/msg00529.html

Priorities of Alternatives. Wouter Verhelst [14]wondered why the package maintainers are allowed to chose the priority for alternatives. Naturally they are biased, as demonstrated with mcedit becoming the default for /usr/bin/editor. Using [15]popularity contest instead would ensure that the applications which most people prefer would be the default.

14. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2006/05/msg02136.html 15. http://popcon.debian.org/

Improving Debian's Publicity. Raphaël Hertzog [16]announced the creation of the [17]debian-publicity mailing list. It aims at helping the press team by preparing and suggesting announcements and reviving the [18]press clipping section of the project's website. It can also be a place to help Debian developers in drafting announcements intended for the [19]debian-news mailing-list. This initiative is one of the conclusions of the [20]Representing Debian meeting held at this year's Debian [21]conference. Assistance by non-technical people would be greatly appreciated.

16. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2006/06/msg00005.html 17. http://lists.debian.org/debian-publicity/ 18. http://www.debian.org/News/press/ 19. http://lists.debian.org/debian-news/ 20. https://debconf6.debconf.org/comas/general/proposals/66 21. http://www.debian.org/events/2006/0514-debconf

Tracking Critical Bugs. Andreas Barth [22]announced some enhancements in his bts2ldap interface for [23]tracking critical issues in Debian packages. The interface now takes into account the version of the package a bug appeared or was resolved in. Steinar H. Gunderson then [24]made many suggestions to improve tracking the resolution state of bugs in the Debian [25]Bug Tracking System, for example by making the official release-critical bug [26]graph use the versioning information.

22. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2006/06/msg00011.html 23. http://bts.turmzimmer.net/ 24. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2006/06/msg00869.html 25. http://bugs.debian.org/ 26. http://bugs.debian.org/release-critical

Separating shared Libraries and Executables. Goswin von Brederlow [27]noted that [28]policy demands that run-time support programs using a shared library must not be put in the shared library package. This would prevent the installation of more than one version of the shared library. Goswin [29]added that it would also complicate a conversion to [30]multiarch.

27. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2006/05/msg02166.html 28. http://www.debian.org/doc/debian-policy/ch-sharedlibs#s-sharedlibs-runtime-progs 29. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2006/05/msg02429.html 30. http://multiarch.alioth.debian.org/multiarch-hp-report.pdf

Debian in Cuba. David Moreno Garza [31]reported that he has been invited to go to Cuba to support some of Cuban Free Software initiatives, which some of them are Debian-based. Walter Landry [32]explained that it used to be illegal under US law to export crypto to any country, which has been relaxed though, but does not include Cuba. According to Walter, some types of communication are allowed, but some are not and even using the mailing list infrastructure may be a problem for Debian.

31. http://lists.debian.org/debian-legal/2006/06/msg00268.html 32. http://lists.debian.org/debian-legal/2006/06/msg00274.html

Automatic Loading of Kernel Modules. Jim Popovitch [33]noticed that the default installation of Debian loads many more kernel modules than he needs and wondered how to prevent this. Robert Sanchez [34]explained that the systems probably have some auto-detection running which automatically load modules for the hardware they have discovered.

33. http://lists.debian.org/debian-isp/2006/06/msg00109.html 34. http://lists.debian.org/debian-isp/2006/06/msg00116.html

Stopping Daemons upon Removal. Michael Prokop [35]wondered about maintainer scripts that fail when they can't stop the daemon process they try to. Henrique de Moraes Holschuh [36]added that stop targets are to exit with a zero exit code 0 if the service is already stopped. Bert Schubert [37]explained that the proper solution for chroot environments is to add a policy-rc.d script and gave an example.

35. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2006/05/msg02437.html 36. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2006/05/msg02470.html 37. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2006/05/msg02483.html

Private List Messages sent to Google Mail. Ian Jackson [38]noted that the current privacy and processing policies of Google Mail are not compatible with Debian's policy for its private list. In his opinion Google should not get a copy of debian-private, even if the only current output is aggregate keyword hit reports.

38. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2006/05/msg02531.html

TrueCrypt Licensing. Karl Goetz [39]wondered if the [40]license of the popular multi-platform disc encryption software [41]TrueCrypt is free enough to allow distributing it with Debian. Michael Poole [42]answered that the license isn't free at all because there are a lot of unclear and unprecise paragraphs which makes it impossible to distribute TrueCrypt within Debian.

39. http://lists.debian.org/debian-legal/2006/06/msg00294.html 40. http://www.truecrypt.org/license.php 41. http://www.truecrypt.org/ 42. http://lists.debian.org/debian-legal/2006/06/msg00295.html

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

* DSA 1101: [43]courier -- Denial of service. * DSA 1102: [44]pinball -- Privilege escalation. * DSA 1103: [45]Linux 2.6.8 -- Several vulnerabilities.

43. http://www.debian.org/security/2006/dsa-1101 44. http://www.debian.org/security/2006/dsa-1102 45. http://www.debian.org/security/2006/dsa-1103

New or Noteworthy Packages. The following packages were added to the unstable Debian archive [46]recently or contain important updates.

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

* [47]ajaxterm -- Web based terminal written in Python. * [48]bfilter -- Simple web filtering proxy. * [49]bmagic -- C++ template library for efficient platform independent bitsets. * [50]bootsplash -- Enables a graphical boot screen. * [51]chalow -- Weblog tool that converts ChangeLog to HTML. * [52]cmus -- Lightweight ncurses audio player. * [53]edos-debcheck -- Checks whether dependencies of Debian packages can be satisfied. * [54]edos-rpmcheck -- Checks whether dependencies of Red Hat packages can be satisfied. * [55]ferret -- CASE tool for edit data models. * [56]gsambad -- GTK+ configuration tool for samba. * [57]hamradiomenus -- Hamradio menus for GNOME and KDE. * [58]klone -- Web application development framework. * [59]kmplayer -- Media player for KDE. * [60]lzma -- Default and general compression method of 7z format in 7-Zip program. * [61]magpierss -- Provides an XML-based (expat) RSS parser in PHP. * [62]mock -- Build RPM packages inside a chroot. * [63]open21xx -- Tool suite for Analog Devices ADSP 21xx family DSPs. * [64]overgod -- Bi-directional scrolling arcade game. * [65]parprouted -- Transparent IP (Layer 3) proxy ARP bridging tool. * [66]pympd -- Frontend for mpd in the style of rhythmbox and itunes. * [67]rhinote -- Virtual sticky-notes for your desktop. * [68]s48-refman -- Unofficial reference manual for Scheme48. * [69]sks-ecc -- Cryptographic tool based on ECC. * [70]smcroute -- Static multicast router daemon. * [71]texmaker -- Free LaTeX editor. * [72]ttf-nafees -- Nafees free OpenType Urdu fonts.

47. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/web/ajaxterm 48. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/net/bfilter 49. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/libdevel/bmagic 50. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/graphics/bootsplash 51. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/web/chalow 52. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/sound/cmus 53. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/devel/edos-debcheck 54. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/devel/edos-rpmcheck 55. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/misc/ferret 56. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/admin/gsambad 57. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/hamradio/hamradiomenus 58. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/web/klone 59. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/kde/kmplayer 60. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/utils/lzma 61. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/web/magpierss 62. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/devel/mock 63. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/electronics/open21xx 64. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/games/overgod 65. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/net/parprouted 66. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/sound/pympd 67. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/x11/rhinote 68. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/doc/s48-refman 69. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/utils/sks-ecc 70. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/net/smcroute 71. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/tex/texmaker 72. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/x11/ttf-nafees

Orphaned Packages. 4 packages were orphaned this week and require a new maintainer. This makes a total of 311 orphaned packages. Many thanks to the previous maintainers who contributed to the Free Software community. Please see the [73]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. To find out which orphaned packages are installed on your system the wnpp-alert program from devscripts may be helpful.

73. http://www.debian.org/devel/wnpp/

* [74]drupal -- Fully-featured content management/discussion engine. ([75]Bug#375496) * [76]htdig -- WWW search system for an intranet or small Internet. ([77]Bug#374643) * [78]mmix -- Assembler and Simulator sources for Knuth's MMIX. ([79]Bug#374646) * [80]qcad -- Professional CAD System. ([81]Bug#374954)

74. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/web/drupal 75. http://bugs.debian.org/375496 76. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/web/htdig 77. http://bugs.debian.org/374643 78. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/devel/mmix-src 79. http://bugs.debian.org/374646 80. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/graphics/qcad 81. http://bugs.debian.org/374954

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 [82]contributing page to find out how to help. We're looking forward to receiving your mail at [83]dwn@debian.org.

82. http://www.debian.org/News/weekly/contributing 83. mailto:dwn@debian.org

This issue of Debian Weekly News was edited by Kai Hendry, Mohammed Adnène Trojette, Sebastian Feltel and Martin 'Joey' Schulze.

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