Debian Weekly News - March 15th, 2005

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Debian Weekly News
http://www.debian.org/News/weekly/2005/11/
Debian Weekly News - March 15th, 2005
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Welcome to this year's 11th issue of DWN, the weekly newsletter for
the Debian community. Sean Finney [1]uploaded the first version of the
[2]dbconfig-common package which implements a general database
maintenance interface and is intended to be used by other packages.

 1. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2005/03/msg00150.html
 2. http://people.debian.org/~seanius/policy/examples/

DebConf 5 Call for Papers. On the 15th of March the [3]Call for
Papers for [4]DebConf 5 will end. The list of [5]proposal contains
more than 20 items. The review committee will make its decision by
April 1st. The Debian conference is most important event where Debian
developers and interested users meet to discuss about the Debian
project and its development. This year DebConf will take place in
[6]Helsinki, [7]Finland.

 3. http://www.debconf.org/debconf5/news/call_for_papers
 4. http://www.debconf.org/debconf5/
 5. http://comas.linux-aktivaattori.org/debconf5/general/proposals
 6. http://www.debconf.org/debconf5/about/helsinki
 7. http://www.debconf.org/debconf5/about/finland

Debian Logo License. Francesco Poli [8]wondered if there has been any
progress recently to change the license of Debian [9]logos to a free
one. Martin Michlmayr [10]answered that SPI's legal council has
written a copyright assignment agreement and the artist of the logo
has agreed to sign it and thereby hand ownership over to SPI. Once
this is done, the license can be changed.

 8. http://lists.debian.org/debian-legal/2005/02/msg00234.html
 9. http://www.debian.org/logos/
 10. http://lists.debian.org/debian-legal/2005/02/msg00241.html

Automatic Integration of USB Storage. Martin Dickopp has [11]developed
a script that automatically mounts USB mass storage devices when they
are plugged in, and unmounts them when they are removed. He
[12]mentioned that similar functionality is included in the [13]pmount
package when it is used as part of the desktop together with the
[14]hal device manager, though.

 11. http://lists.debian.org/debian-mentors/2004/10/msg00308.html
 12. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2005/03/msg00271.html
 13. http://packages.debian.org/pmount
 14. http://packages.debian.org/hal

License for Documentation? Daniel Carrera [15]wondered which license
he should use for documentation and came up with the idea to
co-license it with the [16]Creative Commons Attribution and [17]GNU
GPL. Gervase Markham [18]asked not to use the GPL for documentation as
it wasn't designed for such but admitted that there is no
documentation-specific license that is considered free by the Debian
project.

 15. http://lists.debian.org/debian-legal/2005/03/msg00241.html
 16. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/
 17. http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html
 18. http://lists.debian.org/debian-legal/2005/03/msg00254.html

Key Management on USB Stick. David Härdeman [19]pondered about the
best method to manage private keys (for SSH and GnuPG) on a USB
storage device. The keys should be automatically available when the
key is inserted. At the end he improved a [20]script by Sean Finney
that uses a VFAT system with a loopback filesystem on top.

 19. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2005/03/msg00281.html
 20. http://www.seanius.net/linux/keyloader/usb-storage

Election Discussion Etiquette. In light of the high number of project
leader candidates Jeroen van Wolffelaar [21]asked all participants to
keep their mails brief, stay on-topic, trim the replied text in the
response, alter the subject when the content is changed and to be
polite. Off-topic remarks may better be suited on the
[22]debian-curiosa list.

 21. http://lists.debian.org/debian-vote/2005/03/msg00010.html
 22. http://lists.debian.org/debian-curiosa/

Sarge Release Status. Steve Langasek sent in a new [23]status report
on the sarge release. A modification on the SSH server on the
wanna-build host and on all buildds is required to cushion the load
evoked by the new testing-security queue. After this change is in
place the archive will be frozen in connection with the third release
candidate of the [24]debian-installer.

 23. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2005/03/msg00012.html
 24. http://www.debian.org/devel/debian-installer/

NEW Queue Processing Proposal. Joey Hess [25]proposed to share the
burden of processing the queue of new packages among more people and
not only the ftpmasters. Packages could be uploaded to an alternative
public new queue so that more developers could review the packages and
send back a re-signed .changes file to the main queue. Once a package
was advocated by enough developers it could be processed more
automatically by the archive maintainers.

 25. http://kitenet.net/~joey/blog/entry/random_idea_re_new_queue-2005-03-02-21-12.html

Project Leader Election IRC Debate. Martin F. Krafft [26]announced
that the IRC debate for the upcoming project leader election will take
place on Wednesday, March 16th, at 06:00 UTC on the Freenode IRC
network (irc.debian.org). It will use four IRC channels, whose logs
are going to be made available after the debate.

 26. http://lists.debian.org/debian-vote/2005/03/msg00507.html

Post-Sarge Release Plans. Steve Langasek announced [27]plans for the
release after sarge that includes splitting the Debian archive into a
regular and a second class component with less frequently used
architectures. This should reduce the mirror space and the time
required for keeping testing in shape since it will contain lesser
architectures.

 27. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2005/03/msg00012.html

Asia Debian Mini-Conf 2005. The first [28]Asia Debian Mini-Conf was
successfully held as a part of the [29]5th Asia Open Source Software
Symposium in Beijing, China. Sun Wah Linux kindly sponsored the
meeting and invited several developers from around the world to attend
and give talks. The [30]meeting also helped with integration among
Debian communities in China, Taiwan and Hong Kong, such as the
resurrection of the Chinese Debian channel #debian-zh and some
cooperation in translation work.

 28. http://debian.org.cn/events/admc2005/
 29. http://www.debian.org/events/2005/0228-aosss
 30. http://freelinuxer.net/~carlos/2005/03/asian-debian-mini-conf.html

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

 * DSA 693: [31]luxman -- Local root exploit.

 31. http://www.debian.org/security/2005/dsa-693

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]dak -- Debian's archive maintenance scripts.
 * [34]ewiki -- ErfurtWiki: an implementation of the WikiWikiWeb
   hypertext system.
 * [35]itools -- Islamic Hijri date and prayer time utilities.
 * [36]knights -- Chess interface for the K Desktop Environment.
 * [37]kuake -- Console which looks like Quake game console.
 * [38]lkl -- Userspace keylogger for x86 architecture.
 * [39]marote -- Rig Control Program for the Elecraft K2.
 * [40]mydns-pgsql -- DNS server using PostgreSQL for data storage.
 * [41]nuauth -- Authentication daemon from the nufw package.
 * [42]nufw -- Per-user firewalling daemon that interferes with
   libipq.
 * [43]nutcpc -- Linux client for the nufw authentication gateway
   system.
 * [44]octaviz -- 3D visualisation system for Octave.
 * [45]openntpd -- OpenBSD NTP daemon.
 * [46]smartpm -- Alternative package manager that works with
   dpkg/rpm.
 * [47]svn-workbench -- Workbench for Subversion.
 * [48]wstools -- Digital modes used for DX work on VHF/UHF and
   Microwave.
 * [49]zinc-compiler -- Compiler of Zinc, a functional logic
   programming language.

 33. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/devel/dak
 34. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/web/ewiki
 35. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/misc/itools
 36. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/games/knights
 37. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/kde/kuake
 38. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/utils/lkl
 39. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/hamradio/marote
 40. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/net/mydns-pgsql
 41. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/net/nuauth
 42. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/net/nufw
 43. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/net/nutcpc
 44. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/math/octaviz
 45. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/net/openntpd
 46. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/admin/smartpm
 47. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/devel/svn-workbench
 48. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/hamradio/wstools
 49. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/devel/zinc-compiler

Orphaned Packages. 4 packages were orphaned this week and require a
new maintainer. This makes a total of 223 orphaned packages. Many
thanks to the previous maintainers who contributed to the Free
Software community. Please see the [50]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.

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

 * [51]celestia -- Real-time visual space simulation (GNOME
   frontend). ([52]Bug#298997)
 * [53]fdutils -- Linux floppy utilities. ([54]Bug#298758)
 * [55]manpages-ru -- Russian translations of Linux manpages.
   ([56]Bug#298910)
 * [57]vfu -- Versatile text-based filemanager. ([58]Bug#298999)

 51. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/kde/celestia
 52. http://bugs.debian.org/298997
 53. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/base/fdutils
 54. http://bugs.debian.org/298758
 55. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/doc/manpages-ru
 56. http://bugs.debian.org/298910
 57. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/utils/vfu
 58. http://bugs.debian.org/298999

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 [59]contributing
page to find out how to help. We're looking forward to receiving your
mail at [60]dwn@debian.org.

 59. http://www.debian.org/News/weekly/contributing
 60. mailto:dwn@debian.org


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