Debian Weekly News
http://www.debian.org/News/weekly/2003/50/
Debian Weekly News – December 16th, 2003
Welcome to this year’s 50th issue of DWN, the weekly newsletter
for the Debian community. Finally, the website [1]CVS repository
was [2]resurrected, but the website can still not be updated. Chris
Halls [3]announced that he and René Engelhard have verified
all recent changes in the OpenOffice.org CVS repository. Christoph
Berg [4]proposed to call the experimental distribution “scud”,
which is the name of Sid’s dog that broke toys even worse than Sid
did.
1. http://cvs.debian.org/webwml/?cvsroot=webwml
2. http://lists.debian.org/debian-www-0312/msg00111.html
3. http://lists.debian.org/debian-openoffice-0312/msg00097.html
4. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-0312/msg01291.html
New Features in APT-RPM. Joey Hess [5]noticed an [6]article that
described features in apt-rpm that are not available with plain
apt-get. Some of them would be nice to have as well. The most
interesting feature is to install local files but automatically
satisfy the dependencies through network download if required.
5. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-0312/msg00132.html
6. http://lwn.net/Articles/60650/
Installer Status Report. Joey Hess [7]reported that there are so
many installation [8]reports that the developers have not managed
to follow up on them all as of yet. He added that the big focus for
the next beta release will be on ports and translations. A lot of
work has begun to port the [9]debian-installer to more
architectures, but most of these are nowhere near working.
7. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce-0312/msg00005.html
8. http://bugs.debian.org/installation-reports
9. http://www.debian.org/devel/debian-installer/
Public X Strike Force Repositories. Branden Robinson
[10]announced the availability of anonymous, read-only, public
access to the X Strike Force [11]Subversion repositories via the
Subversion protocol. Write access is restricted to people with SSH
access to the host. Branches include XFree86 4.1.0, 4.2.1 and
4.3.0.
10. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce-0312/msg00006.html
11. http://necrotic.deadbeast.net/~branden/svn_pres/top.html
XFS Support in Debian Installer? Gunnar Wolf [12]wondered if the
[13]debian-installer should [14]support XFS since it will be
[15]included into future releases of Linux 2.4. Joey Hess [16]added
that once the stock Debian kernel contains XFS, support can
trivially be added to the debian-installer.
12. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-0312/msg01077.html
13. http://www.debian.org/devel/debian-installer/
14. http://bugs.debian.org/221132
15. http://kerneltrap.org/node/view/1751
16. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-0312/msg01114.html
Daily Debian-Installer Builds. Martin Sjögren
[17]announced that he has restarted [18]daily builds of the
[19]debian-installer for the x86 architecture. Older builds were
removed because he didn’t have time to verify their integrity.
17. http://lists.debian.org/debian-boot-0312/msg00581.html
18. http://people.debian.org/~sjogren/d-i/images/
19. http://www.debian.org/devel/debian-installer/
New Debian Stable Update CDs. After Ingo Saitz [20]noticed that
the [21]update CD was broken, Steve McIntyre [22]created new images
and jigdo files that should be available in the usual places soon.
He added a README file that explains why there have been two image
files with the same name.
20. http://lists.debian.org/debian-cd-0312/msg00080.html
21.
http://non-us.cdimage.debian.org/jigdo-area/3.0_r1/jigdo/i386/debian-update-3.0r1-i386.jigdo
22. http://lists.debian.org/debian-cd-0312/msg00085.html
Dependencies to lower Priorities? Marc Haber [23]asked if it
should be allowed for packages to depend on others with lower
priorities. Not allowing this makes CD creation easier, but modern
tools can follow the dependencies on their own. Bastian Blank
[24]explained that parsing the entire Packages files during the
basic installation would require at least 6 MB additional
memory.
23. http://lists.debian.org/debian-policy-0312/msg00020.html
24. http://lists.debian.org/debian-policy-0312/msg00037.html
Debian AMD64 FAQ. Bart Trojanowski [25]pointed out the [26]Wiki
resource on this port and mentioned the [27]FAQ that some people
build there. Additionally the developers have [28]discussed how to
implement the mixture of 32-bit and 64-bit libraries.
25. http://lists.debian.org/debian-amd64-0312/msg00012.html
26. http://wiki.debian.net/index.cgi?debian-amd64
27. http://wiki.debian.net/index.cgi?debian-amd64-faq
28. http://lists.debian.org/debian-amd64-0312/msg00017.html
Naming the BSD Ports. Joel Baker [29]reported that he was
approached by a member of the NetBSD team, who expressed that
“Debian GNU/KNetBSD” is a better name for the port than “Debian
GNU/NetBSD”. Robert Millan [30]pointed out that a lot programs are
using uname for system identification when they’re primarily
checking for libc features. Hence, the name needs to be selected
carefully. Joel added the final [31]naming scheme later.
29. http://lists.debian.org/debian-bsd-0312/msg00053.html
30. http://lists.debian.org/debian-bsd-0312/msg00081.html
31. http://lists.debian.org/debian-bsd-0312/msg00098.html
Writing Copyright Files. Peter Palfrader discovered several
badly written copyright files by new maintainers and many by old
maintainers. They lack information about the copyright owner, the
particular license and does not say that the software is licensed
under a particular license. He then wrote a [32]guideline on how to
properly phrase a copyright file that contains all required
information. Developers should also read Andrew Suffield’s [33]mail
on what you should do when writing a copyright file.
32. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce-0312/msg00007.html
33. http://lists.debian.org/debian-legal-0312/msg00194.html
Debian Spain founded. Javier Fernández-Sanguino
Peña [34]reported that a legal Spanish Debian
organisation has been founded during [35]DebConf-ES by more than 20
people. The organization still needs to be approved by the Spanish
Internal Affairs Ministry, though. Once this is done it could also
be a way to collect donations for the Debian project in Spain, to
defend the Debian trademark and to register the debian.es
domain.
34. http://lists.debian.org/debian-project-0312/msg00044.html
35. http://www.hispalinux.es/~amaya/debconf-es/
Collaboration between Debian and KDE Developers. Several Debian
and KDE developers [36]announced a strategic proposal for closer
collaboration between [37]UserLinux and [38]KDE projects. The
[39]strategy consists of KDE core enterprise enhancements,
UserLinux installer and system tools, FreeDesktop.org and
GNOME/GTK+ integration and OpenOffice.org and Mozilla
integration.
36. http://desktop.kdenews.org/strategy.html
37. http://www.userlinux.com/
38. http://www.kde.org/
39. http://www.newsforge.com/article.pl?sid=03/12/15/1621255
Using tmpfs as default? Masanori Goto [40]proposed to use tmpfs
from Linux 2.4 in the default sarge installation which was
[41]discussed long ago already. Roger Leigh [42]added that a size
limit should be added since it is much nicer to get ENOSPC than a
kernel panic.
40. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-0312/msg01149.html
41. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-0111/msg00706.html
42. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-0312/msg01155.html
Providing a graphical WWW Browser. René Engelhard
[43]suggested using the virtual package x-www-browser for all
graphical web browsers. Then other packages could suggest or
recommend a graphical browser while the user can select one among
them. He would also like to add this one to the list of [44]virtual
packages.
43. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-0312/msg01165.html
44.
http://www.debian.org/doc/packaging-manuals/virtual-package-names-list.txt
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[45]contributing page to find out how to help. We’re looking
forward to receiving your mail at [46]dwn@debian.org.
45. http://www.debian.org/News/weekly/contributing
46. mailto:dwn@debian.org