Debian Weekly News - June 21st, 200

Date: Wed, 21 Jun 2000 15:36:26 -0700
From: Joey Hess joeyh@debian.org
To: debian-news@lists.debian.org
Subject: Debian Weekly News – June 21st, 2000

Debian Weekly News
http://www.debian.org/News/weekly/current/issue/ 
Debian Weekly News - June 21st, 2000

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

Release news: Richard Braakman will be gone for a week or two,
and unable to serve as release manager. In the meantime, Anthony
Towns will be [8]stepping in as Acting Release Manager. Anthony has
already [9]posted plans to end the current test cycle in the middle
of this week, and has [10]listed the changes he plans to accept
into potato before the next test cycle.

There are two security fixes this week. A [11]fix is available
for a bug in xinetd’s access control mechanism, and a remote
exploit of zope has also been [12]fixed.

Looking ahead to woody, Joey Hess is [13]stepping up as the new
leader of the woody boot-floppies team. The goal is to redesign the
installation system and replace it with something more modular,
flexible, smaller, and easier to use. Debian Weekly News wishes the
boot-floppies team (and its upcoming leader 😉 luck on this
ambitious endeavor.

Another item removed from dpkg’s wishlist: For years, we have
run into occasional problems where the simplest solution was “use
versioned provides”. Unfortunately, the Provides: field in Debian
packages has never supported versioning. [14]It does now. However,
Jason Gunthorpe [15]points out that using versioned provides in
woody will probably lead to all sorts of upgrade trouble.

Debian’s voting system, as established in the [16]Debian
Constitution, employs an interesting voting method called Concorde
voting. Since Debian is one of the few real-world organizations to
make use of this type of vote counting, we’ve attracted the
interest of members of the [17]Election Methods mailing list. This
week, Norman Petry, a member of the Election Methods list,
[18]posted about a “circular tie” situation where no one wins a
vote, and the constitution does not specify what should be done,
leading to an undefined outcome. He has calculated that “you can
expect to encounter a circular tie about once every 20 elections or
so, on average”. He suggests that we proactively modify the
constitution to fix the problem before it occurs.

Followups to last week’s news:

The discussion about dropping non-free from Debian has died
down. The issue is not resolved though, and will come to vote
soon.
Last week’s offer of $3k to KDE If they could fix their license
has led to more Debian/KDE articles, including a [19]Freshmeat
Editorial by Joseph Carter. It appears that Dr. Bechly has
[20]withdrawn the offer, after KDE declined to send him an official
response. He has retargeted the money to Debian, in hopes of
improving Debian’s installer.

References
8.
http://www.debian.org/Lists-Archives/debian-devel-announce-0006/msg00006.html

9.
http://www.debian.org/Lists-Archives/debian-devel-announce-0006/msg00007.html

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

11. http://www.debian.org/security/2000/20000619

12.
http://www.debian.org/Lists-Archives/debian-devel-0006/msg01541.html

13.
http://www.debian.org/Lists-Archives/debian-boot-0006/msg00279.html

14.
http://www.debian.org/Lists-Archives/debian-dpkg-0006/msg00025.html

15.
http://www.debian.org/Lists-Archives/debian-dpkg-0006/msg00029.html

16. http://www.debian.org/devel/constitution

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

18.
http://www.debian.org/Lists-Archives/debian-vote-0006/msg00095.html

19. http://freshmeat.net/news/2000/06/17/961300740.html