Debian Weekly News - December 19th, 2000

Date: Tue, 19 Dec 2000 22:37:16 -0800
From: Joey Hess joeyh@debian.org
To: debian-news@lists.debian.org
Subject: Debian Weekly News – December 19th, 2000

Debian Weekly News
http://www.debian.org/News/weekly/2000/41/ 
Debian Weekly News - December 19th, 2000

Welcome to a special edition of Debian Weekly News. We had
planned to skip this week for a vacation, but Debian never
sleeps…

Testing has entered the main Debian archive. Testing is a new
branch of Debian to complement stable and unstable. New uploads
enter unstable, and if no bad bugs are found in two weeks time,
flow into testing. Thus, testing is always in an “essentially
releasable state”. Now that package pools exist, it was not too
hard to [1]make testing a part of the main archive. Woody has now
been designated as testing and populated with packages from stable,
with updates that the code behind testing thinks is safe (so if you
have “woody” in sources.list, you’ll probably run into [2]this
problem). Testing is sure to have far-ranging implications
throughout Debian, from package release frequency and everyday
development, to porting and security fixes, to release timing and
management. Interesting times lie ahead.

Now that woody == testing, how’s it doing? Release manager
Anthony Towns made a “[3] state of the woody address”. Important
upgrades like glibc 2.2, X 4.0.1, and perl 5.6 are not in
woody/testing yet, but they soon may be. Unsurprisingly, both the
number of packages and the number of open bugs have increased since
potato was released. Anthony’s main concern is that the new
debian-installer project is not ready yet, and the old boot
floppies need several months of work to be usable for woody. A
related thread discussed other [4]goals for woody Putting all this
together, Anthony projects a freeze in May, with a release in June
— though he cautions: “Presumably it’ll end up getting extended
since nothing ever goes to plan.”

Fixing Debian’s buggy vote counting methods has been the topic
of discussion on debian-vote for several weeks. The few people who
have been involved in the discussion all agree that there are
[5]some ambiguities in the constitution that, if triggered, could
make a vote unresolvable. A [6]proposed fix for the problems turned
out to have an [7]obscure bug of its own. Since this discussion is
becoming increasingly arcane and off-topic for debian-vote and
increasingly on-topic for the [8]Election Methods mailing list, a
[9]joint committee is forming, made up of interested people from
both lists. They will discuss “all the problems with
decision-making process […] in the current constitution”, and
develop a proposal about how to fix them. Of course the final
decision about adopting the proposal will be made by Debian.

Security fixes in the past week include a nasty [10]privilege
escalation bug in zope, a [11]local exploit in slocate, and the
symlink attacks against editors continue with [12]one in nano.

Debian Weekly News will be back next week with a more complete
summary of ongoing Debian discussion and development.

References
1. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-0012/msg01640.html

2. http://lists.debian.org/debian-user-0012/msg03358.html

3. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce-0012/msg00012.html

4. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-0012/msg01739.html

5. http://lists.debian.org/debian-vote-0012/msg00090.html

6. http://lists.debian.org/debian-vote-0012/msg00090.html

7. http://lists.debian.org/debian-vote-0012/msg00106.html

8. http://www.eskimo.com/~robla/em/

9. http://lists.debian.org/debian-vote-0012/msg00091.html

10. http://www.debian.org/security/2000/20001219

11. http://www.debian.org/security/2000/20001217a