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Debian Weekly News – January 23rd, 2002

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Welcome to DWN, the weekly newsletter for the Debian community.
After the last issue was released, several news services, such as
Pro-Linux,
BSD
Today,
Linux Today and Slashdot
featured a story about the Debian (GNU/)NetBSD system. Hopefully it
gets enough attention to help its development.

New Powermac Flavour for Boot-Floppies. Colin
Walters recently completed work on a new-powermac flavour for woody
boot-floppies, and the installer needs more testing. The old
powermac flavour did not support newer hardware, so G4 Powerbook,
iBook2, and iBook Dual USB were not supported properly by older 2.2
kernels, and a 2.4 kernel was needed. This will be released with
3.0.19, please give it a try and report problems to debian-boot@lists.debian.org.

Debian Mini Conference. There’s going to be a
Debian Mini
Conference before the next Linux.conf.au
in Brisbane, Australia, which takes place from February 6th to 9th.
James Bromberger and others are organizing it, and speakers will
include Anthony Towns, Russell Coker, Bdale Garbee, Brendan O’Dea,
Jason Andrade and others. Anyone who is in the region is invited to
come on down and share a beer etc.

New 2.4 Installation Flavour? Eduard Bloch
discussed
how the Debian boot-floppies could support a Linux kernel 2.4.x.
His proposed solution includes a special kernel-image package for
boot-floppies and a new flavour (in addition to plain,
safe, idepci and compact).
This will add more recent hardware to the list of supported
hardware, while the existing flavours will continue to work.

Sponsoring non-free Packages?
Jérôme Marant proposed
that we don’t sponsor people who want to upload non-free packages.
His main concern is that people who are only trying to upload
non-free packages into the Debian archive probably don’t understand
the Debian philosophy and dedication to Free Software. However, our
social
contract talks about support for our users who develop and run
non-free software on Debian. Additionally, sponsors are free to
decide who they sponsor and what they sponsor.

No Freeze Progress? Adrian Bunk is frustrated
because he feels that there is no progress being made in the freeze
of woody. Woody won’t enter the next stage of the freeze until
base and standard packages are in a
releasable state. The current situation prohibits this: the number
of release
critical (RC) bugs in these packages is increasing.

The Release Manager, Anthony Towns, explains:
The goal that was meant to have passed was “no outstanding RC bugs
in base”. However with things like outstanding glibc security bugs
for about one month, along with some other RC issues that have been
around, partially even with a patch sitting in the Bug Tracking
System (BTS), he doesn’t see much point worrying about all the
other things that need to be done. Anthony adds the following
request: Fix RC bugs promptly, and other bugs as soon as you
can.

Internationalizing APT. Michael Piefel announced
that he is working on an internationalized version of APT and
related tools from the same package. Currently Brazilian
Portuguese, Dutch, German, Italian, Polish and Spanish are
supported. If you want to help, please check out the status page. Michael
has uploaded a preliminary
package.

A New Release Scheme? Adrian Bunk proposed a different
release scheme to the release manager, which he thinks will result
in a release by June this year. Anthony Towns proposed
to fix an RC bug with every post to the thread instead of eating up
time and beating each other’s arguments into the ground. Adam Heath
added
that the proposal doesn’t solve the problems with base packages
having unfixed RC bugs.

VAX Port of Debian? Greg Ingram has an old VAX
machine running GNU/Linux and would
like to start porting Debian to this architecture. The only
answer to his request for instructions came from Marcus Brinkmann,
who replied with a detailed
list that starts with “Get rid of your job, your hobbies and
all your friends”. Coming from the person who started our Hurd
port, this pessimistic opinion is definitely not encouraging. One
thing is certain, Greg has a long way to go before he eventually
succeeds.

Mixing Debian Releases the Easy Way. Robert
McQueen sent us a note about
mixing several different releases of Debian with the same
configuration. You’ll still be able to use the testing distribution
for updates, but you are also able to install packages (and their
dependencies) from the unstable distribution if you like to.

CD Image Mirrors. Josip Rodin posted the
list of
currently 66 sites that mirror Debian CD images, that are recorded
in the central Debian mirror database. These sites distribute CD
images through FTP, HTTP or rsync. Some more have been
added since then. Several people are asking for images of 2.2r5,
which were not yet added to the main CD page but are now.

Mobile Debian? Josh Hansen wondered
if there is any current plan for a mobile edition of the Debian
distribution, for use on handhelds like the iPAQ. Shaleh explained
that Debian has been used as a basis for the iPaq’s Linux
distribution. However, it is not designed for handhelds so they
changed a lot. Even use a different (but very very similar)
packaging format. Additionally, there is the Intimate Project which is a
fully blown Debian-based GNU/Linux distribution for the Compaq
iPAQ, and the Familiar
Project that works on creating the next generation of PDA OS,
and that has just recently published the release
candidate for v0.5.1.

Help with Packaging GRASS. A question
came up asking about the status of packaging GRASS. Federico Di
Gregorio replied that he has preliminary packages ready
which are full of packaging errors and generate a single 25MB
package. He asked for help with this effort; so if somebody wants
to help, please contact Federico.

SPAM Causes Trouble on Debian Mailing Lists.
The Debian project runs a lot of mailing lists. Many good
discussions about installation problems, development related items,
policy, documentation, and so on, are made there. These lists are
distressed with a lot of SPAM mails
(such as this
one). While some people eventually unsubscribe from these
lists, others suggest solutions for preventing these mails from
being delivered: procmail
rules, spamassassin, spamfilter etc. However, such
rules need to be updated regularly and filtering out particular
charsets could discourage developers in those countries from
contributing to the project. Note from our listmasters: The lists
are already using spamfilter, but unfortunately it doesn’t prevent
all spam mails.

New or Noteworthy Packages. The following new
or updated packages were added to the Debian archive recently.

  • aranym
    — Atari ST/TT/Falcon software virtual machine.
  • ctie —
    Merge multiple CWEB change files into one file.
  • evms —
    Enterprise Volume Management System.
  • fake —
    IP address takeover tool.
  • gkrellm-newsticker
    — Scrolling News plugin for gkrellm.
  • gkrellm-reminder
    — Reminder plugin for gkrellm.
  • gnumail
    — Clone of NeXT/Apple’s Mail.app application.
  • gtkwave
    — VCD (Value Change Dump) file waveform viewer.
  • hpijs —
    HP Inkjet Server – Ghostscript driver for HP inkjets.
  • libdime
    — DXF Import, Manipulation, and Export library.
  • log-analysis
    — Analyse system’s logs to find out problems.
  • pantomime1
    — An Objective-C library for handling mail.
  • phpsysinfo
    — PHP Based Host Information.
  • pop3browser
    — Allows to check a pop3 mailbox before downloading any mail.
  • preview-latex
    — Render LaTeX equations etc. in an emacs buffer.
  • whisker
    — CGI scanner to audit web servers.
  • xmms-alarm
    — Xmms General plugin for using xmms as an alarm clock.

Security Updates. You know the drill, please
make sure that you update your systems if you have this package
installed.

  • enscript —
    Insecure temporary files.

Orphaned Packages. 13 packages were orphaned
this week. This makes it total 108 orphaned packages. Please see
the WNPP pages for
the full list.

Got news? Please inform us about everything
that’s going on in the Debian community. We are always looking for
more interesting stories to add, especially new items by voluntary
writers. We’re looking forward to receiving your mail at dwn@debian.org.

Latest News: The Tunney Act. Jeremy White from
the WINE project released a
confession of shame, and a call to action. People
who care about WINE, Free Software and Microsoft should read it and
consider sending an email if they are a U.S. citizen.

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