Debian Weekly News - May 20, 2003

Debian Weekly News
http://www.debian.org/News/weekly/2003/20/

Debian Weekly News – May 20th, 2003

Welcome to this year’s 20th issue of DWN, the weekly newsletter
for the Debian community. While Debian is still fighting with some
GCC 3.2 gotchas, the compiler developers apparently [1]released
version 3.3 already. [2]Libranet has released version 2.8 A warm
fuzzy review of this release is [3]here and yet another one
[4]here.

Debian Leader Delegations. Martin Michlmayr [5]reported about
work he did during the last few weeks. Manoj Srivastava will
continue to act as project secretary and Matt Zimmerman has become
a full member of the security team. If you are interested in
[6]helping out with security then just go ahead and help.
Furthermore, Debian [7]memberships in other organizations and
representatives are now documented.

Report from Webb.it. Federico Di Gregorio wrote a [8]report
about the Debian presence at the [9]webb.it conference that took
place from 9th to 11th of May in Padova, Italy. More than 1000
workshops were held during this conference. Italian Debian people
met a lot of other people interested in Free Software, installed
Debian on some machines, signed GPG keys, participated and held
workshops and showed to visitors a cluster of 4 Xbox machines
running Debian.

Debian MIA Check. James Troup [10]announced actions that will be
taken to handle maintainers that are missing in action (MIA). On
the 12th March he sent out a maintainer ping to 191 possibly
inactive Debian developers. 34 mails even bounced, 28 maintainers
replied asking to be retired, 10 replied that they were still
active and 90 people didn’t reply within the 2 month deadline. Some
accounts will be disabled in the near future.

http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce-0305/msg00006.html

Handling Donations for Debian. Martin Michlmayr [11]announced
that Mako Hill will compile a list of donations to the Debian
project that were collected outside of [12]SPI and [13]ffis, two
non-profit organisations that partner with Debian. The people who
still hold Debian money (e.g., from previous trade shows) are asked
to [14]contact him.

Icon or no Icon in Menus? Somebody [15]suggested to use a
default icon for applications in window-manager menus when the
application doesn’t provide an icon. Lars Wirzenius [16]argued
against this idea, since the point of an icon is to be a visual
symbol for the application and not a random graphic.

Some important orphaned Packages. Martin Michlmayr [17]announced
that he has orphaned several packages. Many of these packages have
either outstanding release-critical bugs or have not been uploaded
by the maintainer recently. He seeks for volunteers to fix those
bugs and eventually adopt these packages.

http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-0305/msg00654.html

Important Change in lm-sensors. David Maze [18]reported that the
binary interface in libsensors1 has changed between lm-sensors
2.6.5 and 2.7.0 without a corresponding change in the library’s
soname. The correct action would be a changed soname which has to
be done upstream, who did not yet respond. It has been suggested
that he changes the soname of the library within Debian in the
meantime.

http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-0305/msg00755.html

Translation Dispute about changed Layout. There is a [19]dispute
between the Apache maintainers and the French translation team. The
cause is a changed format of the package description for the French
translation which is not coherent with the original anymore.
Matthias Urlichs [20]added that in his opinion there is a perfectly
valid reason to reformat the description since English text usually
is shorter than the equivalent in other languages.

Security Support for testing. Chris Leishman wrote a [21]text in
which he describes why Debian should support security in testing as
well. Matt Zimmerman [22]explains that fixed packages will
automatically migrate from unstable to testing. If unstable does
not yet contain fixed packages it would be a waste of time
preparing updates for both, testing and unstable.

Going to DebConf 3. Joachim Breitner [23]wondered if [24]DebConf
is worth attending even if one is not yet a registered developer.
Andreas Tille [25]explained that DebConf in Bordeaux was his most
productive time to work for Debian. He adds that the fun thing is
that there are a lot of competent people to ask for help solving
problems.

Activating GNOME Font Settings. Sander Smeenk [26]noticed that
his font settings are stored but not activated when he restarts his
X session. Ross Burton [27]explained that the XSETTINGS database is
not populated because Sander doesn’t start GNOME via gnome-session.
In such a case gnome-settings-daemon has to be executed from the
startup script manually. Mateusz Papiernik [28]explained how such
settings are written into the configuration file.

Translation of Manual Pages. Denis Barbier [29]noticed that
there is currently no consensus whether translated manpages should
be shipped along with original manpages or within manpages-xx
packages. This leads to conflicts when a translation is first
shipped by the latter, then incorporated into the former (e.g. when
it becomes part of upstream tarball).

http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-0305/msg01089.html

New-Maintainers’ Package Repository. Daniel K. Gebhart
[30]announced the [31]Debian Mentors Project which implements a
package repository for people who have applied to become a Debian
developer but are not yet accepted. Since only registered Debian
developers are allowed to upload packages directly into the
official Debian archive, prospective Developers are invited to use
this service.

Splitting off non-free Documentation. Colin Walters
[32]announced that he finally split non-free components off of the
doc-linux package. The new package doc-linux-nonfree is waiting for
ftpmaster approval, and may take a little while since it has a
monster copyright file. Currently, just under 10 % of the HOWTO and
mini-HOWTO documents are in non-free.

http://lists.debian.org/debian-legal-0305/msg00250.html

Debian GNU/FreeBSD Milestone. Robert Millan [33]announced that
his GNU/FreeBSD chroot jail is finally self-hosting and that he was
able to build working packages of glibc 2.3, GCC 3.2.3 and binutils
inside the jail. The [34]tarball has been uploaded, but explicitly
states that this tarball is useless for anything other than
development or bug fixing.

DFSG Analysis of Default LDP License. Branden Robinson
[35]investigated the [36]default license of the [37]Linux
Documentation Project (LDP) in detail. It is also the most popular
license among LDP documents. He proposed to rewrite several
sections though, but the license basically is compliant with the
[38]”Debian Free Software Guidelines.

New IPv6 Packages. Fabio Massimo Di Nitto [39]announced a few
changes that happened to the archive. Until now the policy was to
keep all IPv6 packages aligned to the versions distributed in main.
It is time to break this rule with two packages because we need to
accelerate the testing process. The first package is ntp-unstable,
a CVS snapshot of ntp that supports IPv6 with one exception. The
second package is XFree86 4.3 from Daniel Stone which includes the
IPv6 patch from X.org.

http://lists.debian.org/debian-ipv6-0305/msg00000.html

Constitutional Amendment. Manoj Srivastava posted this
[40]formal proposal to amend the Debian Constitution to introduce
Condorcet/Clone Proof SSD vote tallying in elections and general
resolutions. The proposed changes are a result of the hard work of
an election methods committee. The proposal received the necessary
seconds and the official [41]discussion period ends on Friday May
30 23:59:59 UTC 2003.

Testing the new Voting Scripts. Manoj Srivastava is currently
[42]conducting a vote to test the new voting scripts. He is running
this vote on his home machine, pending the resolution of the fact
that devotee does not run on potato (vote.debian.org/ runs potato). This
vote includes a good test of the super majority calculations, since
two of the options require super majority. The test vote involves
picking one of nine colors and as Manoj said: “May the best color
win.”

http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-0305/msg01289.html

Support for the Ogg Media Type. Ray Dassen [43]reported that the
Ogg bitstream format has been designated an official MIME type in
[44]RFC 3534. It would be good to see Debian support this MIME type
as much as possible. The Ogg bitstream format is the container
format employed for the well-known Ogg Vorbis audio code. Ray added
an incomplete list of packages that require modifications.

Debian Stance on the SCO Allegation. It was [45]asked [46]twice
last week whether the [47]allegations of SCO, formerly know as
Caldera, a GNU/Linux-oriented business, affect the Debian project.
Ray Dassen [48]explained that the issue so far consists of
allegations and rumors from a company that is far along the way to
obsolescence. They have yet to produce anything that could be
remotely considered evidence, while there have been concrete
indications of SCO itself violating the GPL by the inclusion of
GPLed filesystem code from the Linux kernel into its proprietary
(Unixware?) kernel. A detailed [49]analysis was released earlier by
the Open Source Initiative.

Report from the IFIT Conference. A [50]report about the Debian
presence at the [51]IFIT (Informationday Free Information
Technology) that took place on 9th and 10th of May in Innsbruck,
Austria, is online. The conference started with a panel discussion
with politicians and continued with several workshops that gave a
detailed view of many projects, including the Debian development
model.

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

[52]MySQL — Multiple vulnerabilities.
[53]lv — Local privilege escalation.
[54]sendmail — Insecure temporary file creation.
[55]BitchX — DoS and arbitrary code execution.

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

[56]cdbs — common build system for Debian packages.
[57]colordiff — Tool to colorize ‘diff’ output.
[58]dbbalancer — Database connection pooling, load balancing
and write-replication.
[59]ddrescue — Copies data from one file or block device to
another.
[60]ethstatus — Console-based ethernet statistics
monitor.
[61]exim4 — MTA (Mail Transport Agent).
[62]glfer — Program for reception and transmission of
QRSS/DFCW signals.
[63]linwsjt — Digital modes used for DX work on VHF/UHF and
Microwave.
[64]loki — [Biology] MCMC linkage analysis on general
pedigrees.
[65]retchmail — Really fast POP3 retriever.
[66]rsh-redone-client — Reimplementation of rsh and
rlogin.
[67]rsh-redone-server — Reimplementation of rshd and
rlogind.
[68]scapy — Packet generator/sniffer and network
scanner/discovery.
[69]sleuthkit — Tools for forensics analysis.
[70]splint-doc — Documentation for splint: a tool for
statically checking C programs for bugs.
[71]tkcon — Enhanced interactive console for developing in
Tcl.
[72]trickle — User-space bandwidth shaper.
[73]udptunnel — Tunnel UDP packets over a TCP connection.
[74]xsim — X Simple Input Method.

Orphaned Packages. Three packages were orphaned this week and
require a new maintainer. This makes a total of 184 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.

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

[76]libauthen-sasl-cyrus-perl — Perl extension for Cyrus SASL
library. ([77]Bug#193390)
[78]openag — Open alternative to AudioGalaxy Satellite.
([79]Bug#193813)
[80]xpvm — Graphical console and monitor for PVM.
([81]Bug#192886)

Want to continue reading DWN? Please help us create this
newsletter. We still need more volunteer writers who investigate
the Debian community and report about events in the community.
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.

Debian Weekly News – May 20, 2003

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