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Debian Weekly News – October 25th, 2000

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October 26, 2000

Date: Wed, 25 Oct 2000 13:32:22 -0700
From: Joey Hess joeyh@debian.org
To: debian-news@lists.debian.org
Subject: Debian Weekly News – October 25th, 2000

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

Debian Weekly News – October 25th, 2000

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

Debian has package pools! James Troup [1]revealed that “for the
last month and a half, I’ve been working on re-implementing
dinstall and switching to package pools.” His message gives details
about how regular users, developers, and mirror admins will be
affected (not much, not much, and a great deal), the new layout of
the Debian archive, the database backend, the migration strategy
(“an as-of-yet-unwritten tool will migrated n Mb of data a day into
the pool from the legacy dists/ tree”), and the timeline before
this is put in place on the Debian archive (about two weeks).

A beta version of the LSB-FHS test suite was ran against several
major distributions including Debian woody, which failed 17 tests
out of 243. A [2]chart shows that other distributions failed many
more, while SuSE only failed 5. The [3]detailed report of Debian’s
failures is interesting reading. After [4]examining each failure,
Wichert Akkerman commented, “Not all of the test results are fair
in my opinion: some are real bugs in Debian, others are bugs in the
testsuite or the result of using an incomplete install.” Some were
really bugs in the test suite, a few were things that should [5]not
be in the FHS, and 6 of the 9 remaining failures “can be fixed by
simply creating empty directories” Since FHS editor Daniel Quinlan
and the [6]author of the test suite are involved in the discussion,
it appears that all of these things will be eventually worked
out.

Why isn’t Helix Gnome in Debian yet? For a while now there has
been duplication of effort, with Peter Teichman of Helix
maintaining an apt repository of Helix Gnome packages, and other
Debian developers maintaining regular Gnome in Debian. The only
real reason for this duplication of work is that Peter thinks that
there might be [7]copyright problems with some of the images in
Helix Gnome, but he’s not sure, and for whatever reason this
question has been unresolved for some time now. Meanwhile, some
folks [8]feel that “the woody packages aren’t BAD, but after using
Helix, going back feels like a serious downgrade”, and others
[9]have found that the Helix packages “do not have the same quality
when it comes to dependencies and such”. A subthread that tried to
list the differences between the two sets of packages found very
little of note besides Helix’s branding. Whatever the differences,
many people are using the Helix debs, and bothering Debian
developers with things like [10]this bug report. This situation
really needs to be resolved before it has a chance to turn
ugly.

Debian’s newest server is klecker.debian.org, which is now
serving as Debian’s [11]main web server. Of course, it’s named
after Joel “Espy” Klecker. Unfortunately, many home directories
from the old va.debian.org machine, which suffered a disk failure,
have still not been recovered and may be [12]gone for good. A new
hostname, people.debian.org has also been [13]set up, “which will
exclusively be used for individual web pages”. Developers with
personal Debian web pages should begin using URLs based on the new
domain name.

New packages in Debian this week include the following, and [14]80
more:
  * [15]insight: Graphical debugger based on gdb
  * [16]kannel: WAP and SMS gateway
  * [17]scigraphica: Scientific graphics and data manipulation
  * [18]webmin: Web based administration interface

There were no security announcements this week.

More and more Debian news sources are appearing. The latest
arrival is [19]Debian Planet, a web site providing Debian news in a
weblog format. In the meantime, [20]Kernel Cousin Debian is up to
their 7th issue, but still needs more contributors.

References
1. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce-0010/msg00007.html

2. http://www.linuxbase.org/test/results/

3. http://www.linuxbase.org/test/results/Detailed_Debian_Woody.html

4. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-0010/msg01440.html

5. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-0010/msg01731.html

6. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-0010/msg01490.html

7. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-0010/msg01462.html

8. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-0010/msg01432.html

9. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-0010/msg01438.html

10. http://bugs.debian.org/75244
11. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-0010/msg01678.html

12. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-0010/msg01701.html

13. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-0010/msg01706.html