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Welcome to this year's 27th issue of DWN, the weekly newsletter for the Debian community. David Nusinow announced Debian packages for X.Org that he also planned to upload into unstable. Norbert Tretkowski has built backports for sarge. Rajiv Battula has published a small review of Debian GNU/Linux 3.1 in which he demonstrates how simple installing Debian has become.
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Debian Weekly News
http://www.debian.org/News/weekly/2005/27/
Debian Weekly News - July 5th, 2005
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Welcome to this year's 27th issue of DWN, the weekly newsletter for
the Debian community. David Nusinow [1]announced Debian [2]packages
for X.Org that he also planned to upload into unstable. Norbert
Tretkowski has built [3]backports for sarge. Rajiv Battula has
published a small [4]review of Debian GNU/Linux 3.1 in which he
demonstrates how simple installing Debian has become.
1. http://www.livejournal.com/users/gravityboy/14794.html
2. http://people.debian.org/~dnusinow/xorg/
3. http://people.debian.org/~nobse/xorg-x11/
4. http://www.reviewlinux.com/articles/26/1/Debian-3.1-Review
Release Team Meeting. Andreas Barth sent in the [5]minutes of the
release team meeting last week. During the meeting they discussed
issues learned from releasing sarge, list release goals for etch and
proposed a timeline. Potential release blockers are the toolchain
transition, the introduction of X.Org, freeing documentation, the
archive split, the addition of amd64 and securing apt.
5. http://lists.debian.org/debian-release/2005/06/msg00241.html
Ongoing Installer Development. Joey Hess [6]reported about his
ongoing effort to keep the [7]debian-installer working after the
release. The worst breakage so far has been in [8]debootstrap and the
Slang 2 [9]transition seems to cause new problems as well. He also
referred to the first CD images for etch, which don't work, though.
6. http://kitenet.net/~joey/blog/entry/d-i_after_sarge-2005-06-28-00-27.html
7. http://www.debian.org/devel/debian-installer/
8. http://packages.debian.org/debootstrap
9. http://wiki.debian.net/?EtchSlang2upgrade
Request for Packaging? Lars Wirzenius [10]wondered if RFP (request for
packaging) [11]bugs are still useful since there are about thousand of
them. He mentioned [12]freshmeat and [13]gnomefiles as sites where to
look for new stuff to package. As the average age of such requests is
about 200 days, Lars proposed a 365 day maximum age for RFP bugs.
10. http://lists.debian.org/debian-project/2005/06/msg00299.html
11. http://www.debian.org/devel/wnpp/requested
12. http://freshmeat.net/
13. http://www.gnomefiles.org/
Structured Program Output. Olaf van der Spek [14]wondered if there
were plans to add means to emit structured output for several command
line utilities. He noticed that some fields of the output get
truncated if the corresponding values are too wide. Gabor Gombas
[15]explained that those programs are intended to be parsed by humans
and that there are certain other means for programs to gain
comprehensible information.
14. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2005/06/msg01024.html
15. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2005/06/msg01118.html
Ongoing Firefox Trademark Problems. Eric Dorland [16]reported about
the [17]trademark policy that is not compatible with adding random
patches to Debian packages of Firefox and Thunderbird without
infringing their upstream trademarks. In the long discussion Florian
Weimer [18]added that for PHP and Apache Debian has simply ignored
their trademark policy and considered the software sufficiently free.
16. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2005/06/msg01160.html
17. http://www.mozilla.org/foundation/trademarks/policy.html
18. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2005/06/msg01190.html
GLADE Transition. Martin Michlmayr [19]proposed to move from
[20]libglade1 to [21]libglade2 since it has been orphaned two years
ago. Matthew Garrett [22]added that this would require a transition
from GTK1 to GTK2 for all affected packages. Steve Langasek
[23]explained that several packages that use the old library represent
libraries for GNOME 1 that don't have an equivalent for GNOME 2.
19. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2005/06/msg01199.html
20. http://packages.debian.org/libglade0
21. http://packages.debian.org/libglade2-0
22. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2005/06/msg01200.html
23. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2005/06/msg01319.html
Dealing with offensive Material. Ralf Hildebrandt [24]wondered how to
deal with potentially offensive content in a screensaver. Lars
Wirzenius [25]suggested not to install a screensaver that does more
than blank the screen. Alexander Schmehl [26]contributed a piece of
the Fedora patch that removes potentially offending words.
24. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2005/06/msg01388.html
25. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2005/06/msg01400.html
26. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2005/06/msg01435.html
Tilde in Package Versions. Paul Hampson [27]asked if the tilde symbol
may be used in package version now that sarge has been released. Steve
Langasek [28]explained that the required changes have not yet been
made to the archive suite (DAK) to make this possible for etch. Adam
Heath [29]added that DAK uses the symbol as separator internally.
27. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2005/06/msg01425.html
28. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2005/06/msg01482.html
29. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2005/06/msg01483.html
Sixth annual Debian Conference. The Debian project [30]announced the
sixth annual Debian [31]conference which will be held at the Computer
Science department of the Helsinki University of Technology in Espoo,
Finland from July 9th to July 17th 2005. On the first day, several
developers will [32]talks aiming at the general public.
30. http://www.debian.org/News/2005/20050705
31. http://www.debian.org/events/2005/0710-debconf
32. http://www.debconf.org/debconf5/about/debianday
Security Updates. You know the drill. Please make sure that you update
your systems if you have any of these packages installed.
* DSA 733: [33]crip -- Insecure temporary files.
* DSA 734: [34]gaim -- Denial of service.
* DSA 735: [35]sudo -- Pathname validation race.
* DSA 736: [36]spamassassin -- Potential denial of service.
33. http://www.debian.org/security/2005/dsa-733
34. http://www.debian.org/security/2005/dsa-734
35. http://www.debian.org/security/2005/dsa-735
36. http://www.debian.org/security/2005/dsa-736
New or Noteworthy Packages. The following packages were added to the
unstable Debian archive [37]recently or contain important updates.
37. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/newpkg_main
* [38]cedar-backup2 -- Secure backup to CD-R and CD-RW media.
* [39]gajim -- Jabber client written in PyGTK.
* [40]gchangepass -- Password changer for GNOME.
* [41]gnochm -- CHM file viewer for GNOME.
* [42]pads -- Passive Asset Detection System.
* [43]polypaudio -- Pluggable sound server.
* [44]pootle -- Toolkit assisting in the localisation of software.
* [45]qsf -- Small and fast Bayesian spam filter.
* [46]schroot -- Execute commands in a chroot environment.
* [47]zope2.6 -- Open source web application server.
38. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/admin/cedar-backup2
39. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/net/gajim
40. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/gnome/gchangepass
41. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/gnome/gnochm
42. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/net/pads
43. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/sound/polypaudio
44. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/python/pootle
45. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/net/qsf
46. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/admin/schroot
47. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/web/zope2.6
Orphaned Packages. 7 packages were orphaned this week and require a
new maintainer. This makes a total of 222 orphaned packages. Many
thanks to the previous maintainers who contributed to the Free
Software community. Please see the [48]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.
48. http://www.debian.org/devel/wnpp/
* [49]coda -- Server for the Coda distributed file system.
([50]Bug#316014)
* [51]coda-doc -- Documentation files for Coda distributed file
system. ([52]Bug#316015)
* [53]ipac-ng -- IP Accounting for iptables (kernel>=2.4).
([54]Bug#316896)
* [55]lwp -- LWP thread library. ([56]Bug#316016)
* [57]rpc2 -- Remote procedure call library 2. ([58]Bug#316017)
* [59]rvm -- Recoverable Virtual Memory. ([60]Bug#316018)
* [61]tramp -- Remote file access in Emacs. ([62]Bug#316739)
49. http://packages.debian.org/experimental/misc/coda-server
50. http://bugs.debian.org/316014
51. http://packages.debian.org/experimental/doc/coda-doc
52. http://bugs.debian.org/316015
53. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/net/ipac-ng
54. http://bugs.debian.org/316896
55. http://packages.debian.org/experimental/libs/liblwp2
56. http://bugs.debian.org/316016
57. http://packages.debian.org/experimental/libs/librpc23
58. http://bugs.debian.org/316017
59. http://packages.debian.org/experimental/libs/librvm1
60. http://bugs.debian.org/316018
61. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/editors/tramp
62. http://bugs.debian.org/316739
Removed Packages. 29 packages have been [63]removed from the Debian
archive during the past few weeks:
63. http://ftp-master.debian.org/removals.txt
* axkit-xsp-webutils -- AxKit XSP tab library for building web
applications
[64]Bug#210201: Request of QA, long time orphaned, seems pretty
much dead too
* axkit -- An XML Application Server for Apache
[65]Bug#210198: Request of QA, long time orphaned, seems pretty
much dead too
* dbix-cgi-perl -- CGI Extension for libdbix-easy-perl
[66]Bug#288255: Request of QA, obsolete and outdated
* battfink -- GNOME Power Management Configuration
[67]Bug#307644: replaced by the new HAL GNOME Power system
* mdctl -- Dummy package for transition to 'mdadm'.
[68]Bug#308702: Request of Maintainer, obsolete transition package
* rspfd -- Radio Shortest Path Daemon
[69]Bug#244078: Request of Maintainer, Dead upstream, lack of
interest
* yh -- Yan Huang Chinese Platform, a console Chinese environment
[70]Bug#311940: Request of Maintainer, Too buggy, alternatives
(cce, zhcon) exist
* octave-ci -- Contributed functions for the GNU Octave language
[71]Bug#312587: Request of Maintainer, Superseded by octave itself
* octave2.0 -- The GNU Octave language for numerical computations
(2.0 branch)
[72]Bug#312588: Request of Maintainer, Superseded by octave2.1
* mconfig -- Kernel configuration tool
[73]Bug#313255: Request of Maintainer, Request of QA, obsoleted by
improved 2.6 kernel config
* gnofin -- GNOME financial manager
[74]Bug#313269: Request of Maintainer, Dead upstream
* bug -- Reports problems with the Debian distribution (transition
package
[75]Bug#313270: Request of Maintainer, transitional package
* regexplorer -- A visual regular expression explorer
[76]Bug#271737: Request of QA, Dead upstream
* libgtop -- gtop daemon for monitoring remote machines (part of
Gnome)
[77]Bug#307913: Request of Maintainer, Superseded by libgtop2
* java-gnome -- Dummy package to aid upgrade
[78]Bug#313199: Request of Maintainer, obsolete dummy packages
* freebsd-buildutils -- Utilities for building FreeBSD sources
[79]Bug#313409: Request of Maintainer, Superseded by
freebsd5-buildutils
* prozgui -- FLTK-based GUI front end for prozilla
[80]Bug#313484: Request of Maintainer, obsolete, orphaned upstream
* glade-2 -- GTK+ 2 User Interface Builder
[81]Bug#313662: Request of Maintainer, being replaced with 'glade'
* cxx -- Compaq C++ Compiler for Linux Alpha
[82]Bug#314228: Request of Maintainer, unusable with current
binutils, superseded by ccc
* getmail -- POP3, APOP mail gatherer/forwarder (obsolete)
[83]Bug#314599: Request of Maintainer, superseded by getmail4
* plex86 -- Plex86 Empty Disk Image Utility
[84]Bug#314669: Request of Maintainer, obsolete dummy package for
bochs
* gcc-2.96 -- The GNU C preprocessor
[85]Bug#315147: Request of Maintainer, Superseded by gcc-4.0
* raidtools2 -- transitional dummy package that can safely be
removed
[86]Bug#312578: Request of Maintainer, obsolete dummy package
* nautilus-media -- Multimedia goodies for Nautilus
[87]Bug#315012: Request of Maintainer, superseded by totem
* mird -- Mird database library (developer files)
[88]Bug#315223: Request of Maintainer, Dead upstream, better
replacements like sqlite exist
* nemesi -- standards-compliant multimedia streaming client
[89]Bug#315245: Request of QA, Has never been free of RC bugs
* libpgsql-ocaml -- OCaml bindings to PostgreSQL's libpq
[90]Bug#315568: Request of Maintainer, Superseded by
libpostgresql-ocaml
* btools -- miscellaneous Java utility classes
[91]Bug#315632: Request of Maintainer, obsolete
* svn-devscripts -- Dummy package for upgrade purposes only
[92]Bug#314961: Request of Maintainer, obsolete dummy package
64. http://bugs.debian.org/210201
65. http://bugs.debian.org/210198
66. http://bugs.debian.org/288255
67. http://bugs.debian.org/307644
68. http://bugs.debian.org/308702
69. http://bugs.debian.org/244078
70. http://bugs.debian.org/311940
71. http://bugs.debian.org/312587
72. http://bugs.debian.org/312588
73. http://bugs.debian.org/313255
74. http://bugs.debian.org/313269
75. http://bugs.debian.org/313270
76. http://bugs.debian.org/271737
77. http://bugs.debian.org/307913
78. http://bugs.debian.org/313199
79. http://bugs.debian.org/313409
80. http://bugs.debian.org/313484
81. http://bugs.debian.org/313662
82. http://bugs.debian.org/314228
83. http://bugs.debian.org/314599
84. http://bugs.debian.org/314669
85. http://bugs.debian.org/315147
86. http://bugs.debian.org/312578
87. http://bugs.debian.org/315012
88. http://bugs.debian.org/315223
89. http://bugs.debian.org/315245
90. http://bugs.debian.org/315568
91. http://bugs.debian.org/315632
92. http://bugs.debian.org/314961
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 [93]contributing
page to find out how to help. We're looking forward to receiving your
mail at [94]dwn@debian.org.
93. http://www.debian.org/News/weekly/contributing
94. mailto:dwn@debian.org
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