Debian Weekly News - July 11th, 2000

Date: Tue, 11 Jul 2000 18:15:34 -0700
From: Joey Hess joeyh@debian.org
To: debian-news@lists.debian.org
Subject: Debian Weekly News – July 11th, 2000

Debian Weekly News
http://www.debian.org/News/weekly/current/issue/

Debian Weekly News – July 11th, 2000

Welcome to Debian Weekly News, a newsletter for the Debian
developer community. This is a combined two week edition.

The Zeroth Debian Conference took place last week in Bourdeaux,
France. During the Conference many [1]topics were presented,
including two introductory talks on the Hurd, given by Neal
Walfield and Richard M. Stallman; an overview of Debian [2]past and
present, as well as some brief discussion about a new package
format, given by Wichert Akkerman; [3]PingOO, a project to provide
schools with communication servers administered remotely by a
distributed team, and [4]Telemetry Software (management and
diagnostics of networks and servers) provided by [5]SiteRock, both
of them based on Debian GNU/Linux. Major discussions took place
around the topics of Debian’s internal organization and the new
maintainer process. For more information, see [6]this summary by
Marcelo Magallon. [7]Plans are already underway for the First
Debian Conference next July.

Anthony Towns [8]posted an update on the status of test cycle 3,
which begins Real Soon Now. “The purpose of the third test cycle is
simply to ensure that we’re ready to release: we believe the
previous two cycles have shaken out most of the bugs in the install
procedure, so we don’t expect major problems.” Randolph Chung said
in an [9]install report of the latest boot-floppies build that
boot-floppies “2.2.16 for i386 is definitely ready for upload, and
probably ready for potato release.” Things have been slightly
delayed though, with so many Debian people at the Zeroth Debian
Conference.

Saying goodbye to libc5. Ben Collins [10]proposed that all the
libc5 support packages be removed from unstable, since it has been
years since Debian was a libc5 distribution and keeping libc5
support has led to a “lot of very old cruft and hacks”. Ben asked
if anyone had “compelling reasons to continue to have it around”,
and so far no one has thought of any.

Paul J Thompson thinks that Debian is reaching “critical mass”
of public recognition. He cites the increasing number of
[11]distributions based on Debian, the many people and projects
that are beginning to release debian packages and support Debian,
etc. With growth comes problems, and Paul identifies two key
problems that are nothing new: the unmanageable number of packages,
and release schedule difficulties. He goes on make a “radical”
suggestion to address the problems — split up Debian into several
sections like core, rapid development, and so on, that have
different release schedules. It’s an [12]interesting message, well
worth reading even if you [13]disagree with his ideas.

More news tidbits:
  * Chuan-kai Lin has [14]set up a [15]web page devoted to tracking
    key signing requests.
  * Fumitoshi UKAI is working on [16]auto-apt, a tool that tracks the
    files you try to use and automatically installs them on the fly.
  * Slashdot is [17]interviewing Ian Murdock, Debian's founder.

And finally, here is [18]an article by one reporter who really
understands Debian (and reads debian-devel). “Debian stands out as
the primary Linux distribution that is a community, as opposed to
other distributions that simply have communities. […] Debian’s
committee-type workings are occasionally cantankerous and
political, and it has never been quick to react or to release. But
the quality of its work is unquestioned, as is the group’s
commitment to software freedom.”

References
1. http://lsm.abul.org/program/topic18_en.html

2. http://www.wi.leidenuniv.nl/~wichert/talks/

3. http://www.pingoo.org/
4. http://www.openrock.net/
5. http://www.siterock.com/
6.
http://www.debian.org/Lists-Archives/debian-news-00/msg00023.html

7. http://www.debian.org/News/weekly/current/issue/mail#2

8.
http://www.debian.org/Lists-Archives/debian-devel-announce-0007/msg00000.html

9.
http://www.debian.org/Lists-Archives/debian-testing-0007/msg00006.html

10. http://www.debian.org/News/weekly/current/issue/mail#1

11. http://www.debian.org/related_links#basedon

12.
http://www.debian.org/Lists-Archives/debian-devel-0006/msg02181.html

13.
http://www.debian.org/Lists-Archives/debian-devel-0006/msg02209.html

14.
http://www.debian.org/Lists-Archives/debian-devel-0007/msg00327.html

15. http://oink.cc.ntu.edu.tw/~cklin/signing/index.html