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Debian Weekly News – March 7th, 2000

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March 9, 2000

Date: Wed, 8 Mar 2000 15:08:17 -0800
From: Joey Hess [email protected]
To: [email protected]
Subject: Debian Weekly News – March 7th, 2000

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

Debian Weekly News – March 7th, 2000

Welcome to Debian Weekly News, a newsletter for the Debian
developer community. This is a combined 2 week summary.

We’ve now passed the first Release Critical Bug Horizon, and 20
packages will soon be [8]removed from potato. The bug horizon has
been a success, based on the number of release critical bugs that
have been closed in the past 2 weeks — for a while less than 200
were open, down from 300+ a few weeks ago — fewer RC bugs than any
time since last summer. The [9]number of bugs is on the rise again
though, and another bug horizon may be called.

Project leader elections close in just a few days. Do remember
to [10]vote. Linux.com has posted interviews with [11]Wichert
Akkerman and [12]Matthew Vernon. Joel Klecker was not interviewed,
but he did make a [13]brief statement.

Two new ways to show people Debian in action:
* Install Debian wherever you go with the latest version of
LinuxCare’s [14]Bootable Business Card which allows installation of
the Debian base system, right off the mini-CD.
* Compaq’s [15]testdrive program now includes accounts on i386 and
alpha Debian systems.

Ddiff was [16]announced. Ddiff is a tool to generate binary
diffs between different versions of .deb packages.

Two security problems were fixed this week. Fixes are available
for remote exploits of the [17]nmh and [18]htdig packages in slink.
There was discussion of a man exploit on bugtraq, but Debian uses a
different man package and is not vulnerable. Similarly, bugtraq
discussion indicates we aren’t vulnerable to the [19]dosemu
problems present in Corel Linux.

New packages in Debian this week include the following and
[20]19 more:
* [21]corewars: The classic corewars game with gtk-look
* [22]dhis: Dynamic Host Information System client ([23]server)
* [24]libsdl-mixer1.0: mixer library for Simple DirectMedia Layer
([25]dev)
* [26]libvds-dev: The view-dependent simplification library
* [27]unison: A file-synchronization tool for Unix and Windows

References
8.
http://master.debian.org/www-master/debian.org/Lists-Archives/debian-devel-announce-0003/msg00007.html

9. http://bugs.debian.org/~wakkerma/bugs/

10.
http://master.debian.org/www-master/debian.org/Lists-Archives/debian-devel-announce-0003/msg00002.html

11. http://linux.com/interviews/20000224/41/

12. http://linux.com/interviews/20000224/42/

13.
http://master.debian.org/www-master/debian.org/Lists-Archives/debian-devel-0002/msg01796.html

14. http://www.linuxcare.com/bootable_cd/

15.
http://master.debian.org/www-master/debian.org/News/weekly/current/issue/mail#1

16.
http://master.debian.org/www-master/debian.org/Lists-Archives/debian-devel-0002/msg01907.html

17.
http://master.debian.org/www-master/debian.org/Lists-Archives/debian-security-announce-00/msg00005.html

18.
http://master.debian.org/www-master/debian.org/Lists-Archives/debian-security-announce-00/msg00004.html

19.
http://www.securityfocus.org/vdb/bottom.html?section=discussion&vid=1030