Debian Weekly News for October 11, 2000

Date: Wed, 11 Oct 2000 13:43:08 -0700
From: Joey Hess [email protected]
To: [email protected]
Subject: Debian Weekly News – October 11th, 2000

Debian Weekly News
http://www.debian.org/News/weekly/current/issue/ 
Debian Weekly News - October 11th, 2000

Welcome to Debian Weekly News, a newsletter for the Debian
community.

Making bugs more manageable. Adam Heath and Anthony Towns have
been working on the bug tracking system recently, and have
implemented an [1]important new feature. Bug reports can now have
“tags” associated with them, to allow the bugs to be categorized in
various ways that should be useful for developers who are trying to
deal with large volumes of bug reports. Some of the tags that can
be used include “patch”, “wontfix”, “moreinfo”, “unreproducible”,
and “stable”. It should be interesting to see in the next few weeks
how these tags effect the use of the BTS.

Several bugs in the bug tracking system itself have popped up
recently, including duplicated bug reports, and some bug reports
that were not sent to the maintainer (maintainers should check
their bug list page on the BTS web site). Adam Heath posted a
[2]summary of the status of these problems. He also talked about
upcoming development ideas for the BTS, and noted that “Yes,
Debbugs activity is picking up again. This is good.”

Vladimir Vukicevic has managed to squeeze Debian onto Compaq’s
IPaq handheld, and has written a [3]HOWTO describing the process.
Aside from some missing information in section 1.2.2, it looks
fairly painless. It does require a compact flash card be used with
the IPaq for the root filesystem.

Will a lack of security support for Debian 2.1 harm Debian’s
future growth? A few weeks ago the security team announced that
they are phasing out security support of Debian 2.1. This was
discussed in a [4]recent Linux Weekly News, which explored the
possibility that commercial third parties such as Stormix and Corel
could take over such security support, but concluded that “the
commercial distributors are not filling in the Debian support gap.”
They also predict that there is an audience for such fixes, and
state that Debian “is going to have to address the concerns that
audience has. One important component of that is to provide timely
updates for current and past releases. Currently, this need is not
being met, and that will affect Debian’s future growth.”” In the
meantime, few people asked the security team to continue to support
Debian 2.1, and a security hole in boa that exposes the contents of
local files has been [5]fixed — but only in Debian 2.2 and
unstable. (Also, the security team has announced that esound is
[6]not vulnerable to a recently reported /tmp file race condition
— it was fixed back in February.)

Should locale data be split out of large packages in some way?
This question first came up when KDE was added to Debian last
month. KDE includes nearly 50 kde-i18n-* packages, one for each
support language. Now glibc’s maintainer is confronting the [7]same
problem: He’d like to let people avoid downloading and installing
20 megabytes of locale data that is currently contained in the
locales and i18ndata packages if they are only going to use one
language. The obvious solution is to split the packages as was done
with KDE, but there are already [8]complaints about KDE’s many i18n
packages; splitting each major package into 50 packages will not
scale — it will make the package lists even more unwieldy to
download and read through. Some ideas are to dpkg support some form
of [9]subpackages, or let dpkg be told [10]never install files into
certain directories, so even if all the locale data has to be
downloaded, one can choose to only install part of it. Neither idea
is perfect, and there is no resolution on this question yet.

Voting has begun on whether to remove non-free from the Debian
archive. This decision will be made in [11]two stages: The
[12]first ballot will determine which of two proposals is finally
voted on. Or, if you prefer, you can debate the [13]finer points of
Debian constitutional procedure, and argue about whether this
ballot should be retracted entirely. Most of us would [14]rather be
coding, so Debian Weekly News will not go into any more detail on
this issue until it is resolved.

Andover News profiles Ian Murdock, father of Debian and also now
a baby girl (congrats, Ian and Deb!). [15]The article provides some
insights into Ian, and also some good quotes about Debian, such as:
“It’s critical mass. I was Debian and eventually it grew beyond
that and other people became involved and at some point, I’m not
sure when, it took upon a life of its own. Like a living organism
it’s got it’s own survival instinct.”.

References
1. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-0010/msg00551.html

2. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-0010/msg00378.html

3.
http://primates.helixcode.com/~vladimir/ipaq/debian-ipaq-howto.html

4. http://lwn.net/2000/1005/
5. http://www.debian.org//security/2000/20001009

6. http://www.debian.org/security/2000/20001008

7. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-0010/msg00252.html

8. http://bugs.debian.org/71548
9. http://lists.debian.org/debian-glibc-0010/msg00005.html

10. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-0010/msg00430.html

11. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-0010/msg00693.html

12. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce-0010/msg00004.html

13. http://lists.debian.org/debian-vote-0010/msg00036.html

14. http://lists.debian.org/debian-project-0010/msg00001.html