Date: Tue, 7 Nov 2000 23:34:25 -0800
From: Joey Hess joeyh@debian.org
To: debian-news@lists.debian.org
Subject: Debian Weekly News – November 07th, 2000
Debian Weekly News
http://www.debian.org/News/weekly/2000/36/
Debian Weekly News – November 07th, 2000
Welcome to Debian Weekly News, a newsletter for the Debian
community.
XFree86 4.0.1 has [1]entered unstable. The new version of X took
significant effort to package — Branden Robinson worked on it
nearly full time for “about 4 months”, reorganizing the entire set
of packages, waiting for security holes to be fixed, and producing
some 50 test releases to work out all the kinks. The result is a
surprisingly polished upgrade (by unstable’s standards anyway —
[2]many problems are still being encountered).
A slightly less polished upgrade involving perl 5.6 and dpkg
1.7.0 has also hit unstable. A bug in the update-alternatives
provided by the new version of dpkg [3]broke perl for a while, and
though the problem is at least partly [4]resolved by now, many
smaller problems are still being dealt with. Unstable seems likely
to live up to its name for the next week or two.
The new version of dpkg has [5]several new features, including
support for marking the origin of a package for use by third party
.deb creators like HelixCode that should allow bugs to be directed
to the right place, a “statoverride” mechanism that allows
overriding the permissions of any file on the system across
upgrades, an improved dpkg-shlibdeps, and a new /etc/dpkg/dpkg.cfg
config file.
Progeny has [6]announced a public beta test of Progeny Debian,
“an open source, commercial version of Debian”. According to the
press release, “Progeny Debian features a new installer, as well as
new tools for administration, configuration and package management”
An announcement posted to debian-devel provides [7]more details:
They have modified several Debian packages to add Gnome interfaces,
so their package management is done via “gtasksel”, a modified
tasksel, and package configuration makes heavy use of Debconf with
a Gnome frontend. Other features include hardware autodetection and
GRUB. Progeny was asked if their enhancements will be contributed
back to Debian, and [8]responded “Yes, at the discretion of the
Debian maintainers of the relevant packages.” Progeny Debian is
based on unstable, and “has been tested thoroughly by Progeny’s
developers” — as such, once it comes out of beta, it might serve
as a useful upgrade for those who need unstable’s features but
cannot deal with daily upgrades and breakage. (See also: [9]an
article on Debian Planet about Debian and commercial variants.)
The first in a series of weekly debian-installer status reports
was [10]released, detailing what progress is being made on the new
Debian installer, and listing the many parts that have yet to be
written.
References
1. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-changes-0011/msg00160.html
2. http://bugs.debian.org/branden@debian.org
3. http://bugs.debian.org/76438
4. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce-0011/msg00002.html
5. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce-0011/msg00003.html
6. http://www.progeny.com/debian/
7. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-0010/msg02219.html
8. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-0011/msg00029.html
9. http://www.debianplanet.org/debianplanet/article.php?sid=28
10. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-0011/msg00092.html
—
see shy jo