Debian Weekly News - July 20th, 2004 (fwd)

From: Frederick Noronha (FN) (fred_at_bytesforall.org)
Date: 07/26/04

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Date: 26 Jul 2004 10:55:11 GMT

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Debian Weekly News
http://www.debian.org/News/weekly/2004/28/
Debian Weekly News - July 20th, 2004
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Welcome to this year's 28th issue of DWN, the weekly newsletter for
the Debian community. The University of Zaragoza in Spain [1]plans to
distribute 50,000 copies of their [2]distribution which is based on
Debian GNU/Linux and utilises the GNOME desktop. NewsForge took a
[3]look at the upcoming release of Linux Standard Base 2.0.

  1. http://www.aragob.es/pre/cido/c0407121.htm
  2. http://pulsar.unizar.es/gluz/
  3. http://www.newsforge.com/article.pl?sid=04/07/09/2342211

General Resolution to force AMD64 into Sarge? Josselin Mouette
[4]proposed a general resolution to force the pure AMD64 port into
the release of sarge and its immediate inclusion into the unstable
distribution. It's not clear to everybody on the list, though, that
this is the [5]right way to get this port [6]accepted into Debian
nor help with the [7]release of sarge etc.

  4. http://lists.debian.org/debian-vote/2004/07/msg00019.html
  5. http://lists.debian.org/debian-vote/2004/07/msg00067.html
  6. http://lists.debian.org/debian-vote/2004/07/msg00070.html
  7. http://lists.debian.org/debian-vote/2004/07/msg00024.html

Debian is increasing it's Market Share. Netcraft is [8]reporting that
Debian shows market share gains among GNU/Linux distributions while
Gentoo currently has the fastest percentage growth rate. Debian
GNU/Linux is now running on more than 1 million web-facing hostnames,
showing particular strength among French service providers Gandi (72
thousand hostnames) and Proxad (58.8 thousand).

8. http://news.netcraft.com/archives/2004/07/12/slight_linux_market_share_loss_for_red_hat.html

Incorporating upstream CVS Fixes. Tommaso Moroni [9]wondered how he
is supposed to incorporate a bugfix in the package which upstream has
corrected only in CVS. Matthew Palmer [10]explained that unless the
bugfix is very large and invasive, the best way is to pick the changes
out of CVS and apply them to the Debian package. Robert Collins
[11]added that [12]cscvs can help identify changesets with CVS.

  9. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2004/06/msg01074.html
  10. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2004/06/msg01076.html
  11. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2004/06/msg01088.html
  12. http://packages.debian.org/cscvs

Library Version Naming. Roland Stigge [13]reported that he is
struggling with the upstream convention of incorporating the package
version into the library name (soname) and wanted to know how to
proceed. Daniel Kobras [14]suggested to get versioning sanitized
upstream and pointed to the [15]library packaging guide.

  13. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2004/06/msg01092.html
  14. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2004/06/msg01118.html
  15. http://www.netfort.gr.jp/~dancer/column/libpkg-guide/libpkg-guide.html

GNUstep Policy Violation. Dan Weber [16]reported that many packages
associated with GNUstep are in violation with the [17]Filesystem
Hierarchy Standard since they install binaries, documentation, etc in
/usr/lib/GNUstep. Sebastian Ley [18]explained that the OpenStep
directory layout is not compliant with the FHS layout, although they
share similar design principles. Andreas Barth [19]suggested dealing
with it after the release of sarge.

  16. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2004/06/msg01143.html
  17. http://www.pathname.com/fhs/
  18. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2004/06/msg01156.html
  19. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2004/06/msg01183.html

GNU Compiler Collection 3.4 in unstable. Matthias Klose [20]announced
his plan to upload gcc-3.4 packages to unstable. For some
architectures the binary interface has been changed, so compiled code
must not be mixed with compiled code from older versions of G++.

20. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2004/07/msg00806.html

Installing apt-listchanges as Default. Joey Hess [21]wondered why
[22]apt-listchanges is still not installed on default. Matt Zimmerman
was [23]concerned that the priorities of apt-listchanges' dependencies
would have to be raised. David Weinehall [24]explained that only the
priorities of [25]ucf and [26]python-apt would need to be bumped to
standard.

  21. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2004/07/msg00872.html
  22. http://packages.debian.org/apt-listchanges
  23. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2004/07/msg00877.html
  24. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2004/07/msg01142.html
  25. http://packages.debian.org/ucf
  26. http://packages.debian.org/python-apt

New License for POSIX Manpages. Andre Lehovich [27]reported that the
upstream maintainer for manpages has received permission from IEEE to
include text from the POSIX documentation in Linux manual pages and
wondered if the new license is compatible with the [28]Debian Free
Software Guidelines (DFSG). Nathanael Nerode [29]believes that the
license is not free enough and Andrew Suffield is [30]undecided.

  27. http://lists.debian.org/debian-legal/2004/06/msg00173.html
  28. http://www.debian.org/social_contract#guidelines
  29. http://lists.debian.org/debian-legal/2004/06/msg00182.html
  30. http://lists.debian.org/debian-legal/2004/06/msg00176.html

Free Software Printing Summit. Roger Leigh sent in a [31]report from
the Free Software Printing Summit that was held during this year's LSM
in Bordeaux where he was representing both Gimp-Print and Debian. An
interesting discussion addressed multilingual PPD files. Another
discussion included colour management for unprintable colours.

31. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2004/07/msg00904.html

Listmaster Bits and Bytes. Pascal Hakim sent in new [32]bits from the
listmasters. He explained how crossassassin and the new [33]white-list
works. He anticipated that the new list server which is currently in
preparation will allow us to run more stringent anti-spam checks. He
also reported about new and modified mailing lists.

32. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2004/07/msg00013.html
33. http://lists.debian.org/whitelist

New Package Status Summaries. Ian Lynagh [34]announced a new
[35]package build status page and another [36]package status page. The
first one contains links to logs from failed build attempts and
provides a summary of package build attempts.

  34. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2004/07/msg00011.html
  35. http://people.debian.org/~igloo/status.php
  36. http://people.debian.org/~igloo/package-status.php

Status Update for GNOME in Sarge. Jordi Mallach [37]reported that all
critical bits of GNOME are in sarge now, but there are still some
packages like [38]gnome-panel that still need to transition. All of
the remaining stuff is waiting on [39]gst-plugins0.8, which should be
ready for testing but which depends on the new version of [40]libxml2,
that isn't being built on hppa due to a binutils/gcc/whatever bug.

  37. http://www.debian.org/News/weekly/2004/28/x
  38. http://packages.debian.org/gnome-panel
  39. http://packages.debian.org/gst-plugins0.8
  40. http://packages.debian.org/libxml2

Packaging Hardware Emulators. Dan Korostelev [41]wondered why
[42]visualboyadvance, a Game Boy Advance emulator, is only in contrib
in woody since it is free itself and only depends on free libraries.
There are also free (as in freedom) rom files for it available on the
Internet, but not in Debian. Branden Robinson [43]cited the
requirements for packages in main. In sid, however, this package is
already in main.

  41. http://lists.debian.org/debian-legal/2004/06/msg00459.html
  42. http://packages.debian.org/visualboyadvance
  43. http://lists.debian.org/debian-legal/2004/07/msg00275.html

Dealing with different Freenesses. Zenaan Harkness [44]noticed that
there are different definitions of free, at least "FSF-free" and
"DFSG-free". He wondered what would it take to provide to the user the
option to choose between these definitions when it comes to packages
they wish to install. Michael Poole [45]explained that there are two
significant and unavoidable costs to provide this feature: The
infrastructure support for it and the policy work for it.

44. http://lists.debian.org/debian-legal/2004/07/msg00022.html
45. http://lists.debian.org/debian-legal/2004/07/msg00023.html

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

  * [46]ethereal -- Denial of service.
  * [47]netkit-telnet-ssl -- format string vulnerability.
  * [48]l2tpd -- Buffer overflow.

  46. http://www.debian.org/security/2004/dsa-528
  47. http://www.debian.org/security/2004/dsa-529
  48. http://www.debian.org/security/2004/dsa-530

New or Noteworthy Packages. The following packages were added to the
unstable Debian archive [49]recently or contain important updates.

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

  * [50]abuse -- SDL port of the Abuse action game.
  * [51]bygfoot -- Soccer (football) manager game featuring the most
    important European leagues.
  * [52]cdw -- Tool for burning CD's - console version.
  * [53]diatheke -- CGI script for making bible website.
  * [54]gabber2 -- Jabber client for the GNOME desktop.
  * [55]gcdw -- Tool for burning CD's - graphical version.
  * [56]gnome-gpg -- GPG passphrase agent based on GNOME Keyring.
  * [57]hf -- Amateur-radio protocol suite using a soundcard as a
    modem.
  * [58]ldapvi -- Perform an LDAP search and update results using a
    text editor.
  * [59]lfm -- Simple but powerful file manager for the UNIX console.
  * [60]papaya -- Extensible MUD client.
  * [61]pic2fig -- Convert PIC drawings to FIG drawings.
  * [62]potion -- IP Flow Monitor.
  * [63]pylint -- Python code static checker.
  * [64]qtstalker -- Commodity and stock market charting and technical
    analysis.
  * [65]stratagus-gl -- Realtime strategy game for Unix and X - OpenGL
    version.
  * [66]tcpick -- TCP stream sniffer and connection tracker.
  * [67]zoo -- Manipulate zoo archives.

Debian Packages introduced last Week. Every day, a different Debian
package is [68]featured from the testing distribution. If you know
about an obscure package you think others should also know about, send
it to [69]Andrew Sweger. Debian package a day introduced the following
packages last week.

68. http://www.livejournal.com/users/debaday/
69. http://www.livejournal.com/userinfo.bml?user=debaday

  * [70]discus -- Pretty version of df(1) command.
  * [71]most -- Pager program similar to more and less.
  * [72]x2vnc -- Dual-screen hack - link a MS-Windows and X display.
  * [73]pdftk -- Useful tool for manipulating PDF documents.
  * [74]prokyon3 -- MP3 and Ogg/Vorbis manager and tag editor.

  70. http://www.livejournal.com/users/debaday/23958.html
  71. http://www.livejournal.com/users/debaday/24084.html
  72. http://www.livejournal.com/users/debaday/24559.html
  73. http://www.livejournal.com/users/debaday/24827.html
  74. http://www.livejournal.com/users/debaday/25073.html

Orphaned Packages. 9 packages were orphaned this week and require a
new maintainer. This makes a total of 169 orphaned packages. Many
thanks to the previous maintainers who contributed to the Free
Software community. Please see the [75]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.

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

  * [76]bbconf -- Blackbox configuration utility. ([77]Bug#259581)
  * [78]bbkeys -- Application to handle key bindings in Blackbox.
    ([79]Bug#259582)
  * [80]bbpager -- Pager for the Blackbox window manager.
    ([81]Bug#259583)
  * [82]bbpal -- Displays an image, and changes it every few seconds.
    ([83]Bug#259584)
  * [84]libclass-multimethods-perl -- Support multimethods and
    subroutine overloading in Perl. ([85]Bug#259586)
  * [86]libquantum-entanglement-perl -- Quantum Mechanic entanglement
    of variables in perl. ([87]Bug#259587)
  * [88]libquantum-superpositions-perl -- Quantum Mechanic-like
    superpositions for Perl. ([89]Bug#259588)
  * [90]mpgtx -- Toolbox to manipulate MPEG files (video, system, and
    audio). ([91]Bug#259741)
  * [92]selectwm -- Select a window manager at X startup.
    ([93]Bug#259742)

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 [94]contributing
page to find out how to help. We're looking forward to receiving your
mail at [95]dwn@debian.org.

94. http://www.debian.org/News/weekly/contributing
95. mailto:dwn@debian.org

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