Debian Weekly News - October 3rd, 2000

Date: Wed, 4 Oct 2000 15:22:06 -0700
From: Joey Hess joeyh@debian.org
To: debian-news@lists.debian.org
Subject: Debian Weekly News – October 3rd, 2000

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

Debian Weekly News – October 3rd, 2000

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

It should be safe to use unstable again. With [1]this upload of
glibc, the change that caused most of the problems was reverted.
The db2 libraries will remain in Debian’s glibc for the time being
to provide backwards compatibility. Ben Collins [2]explains: “I
don’t have time to list everything it fixes, but I can tell you
that it fixes EVERY issue that EVERYONE was having.”

Discussion this week focused on the bug tracking system,
especially the (ab)use of bug severities. It started off with
[3]this post from Anthony Towns, who is not the first to notice
that far too many bug reports seem to be flagged important. Anthony
wondered if changing the definition of important bugs could help
with this problem. The ensuing discussion revealed some disquieting
things. There is a growing perception among both users and
developers that normal severity bugs are often ignored, and an
inflated severity is needed to ensure a bug gets attention. As Sean
Perry [4]put it, “short of lighting a fire under someone, some bugs
are simply ignored.” One way to combat this perception, be it true
or false, is to become more active in fixing as many bugs as
possible. Anthony proposed that “maybe we should have some
bugsquash months instead of just bugsquash weekends” and wondered
if we could make it a release goal to ship with only 8000 open
bugs. Even users can help; it’s now easy to [5]look up all the bugs
you have submitted. (There is even a [6]search form on the web
site.) When Roland Rosenfeld did that, he said he was “shocked how
many of them were still open. Some of them were already fixed in
the packages, but the maintainer had forgotten to close the bug
reports. Some trivial to fix bugs weren’t attac(k)ed for months or
years ” Every bug reporter can take a look at the bugs they’ve
filed, close any that have accidentally been fixed but not closed,
and perhaps send the maintainer a gentle reminder to do something
about the rest. The problems discussed in this thread can’t be
solved easily, only a great deal of hard work can make all bugs be
dealt with promptly.

Tuxtops is offering Debian pre-loaded on their laptops. The
[7]press release says it is “specially tuned for laptops” and
mentions some installation improvements. According to their
[8]Quickstart Guide, it is based on woody.

New packages in Debian this week include the following, and [9]31
more:
  * [10]aeromail: Web-based e-mail client
  * [11]sather: Compiler and programming environment for Sather.
    ([12]browser, [13]doc, [14]lwp, [15]emacs mode)
  * [16]sphinx2: speech recognition utilities ([17]lib, [18]language
    data, [19]dev)

Kernel Cousin Debian #4 [20]is out and covers many threads from the
past few weeks that were not mentioned in DWN. If you think this
issue of DWN is too short, give it a read.

References
1. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-changes-0009/msg02620.html

2. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-0009/msg02198.html

3. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-0009/msg02232.html

4. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-0010/msg00101.html

5. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-0010/msg00048.html

6. http://bugs.debian.org/
7. http://lwn.net/daily/tuxtops-debian.php3

8. http://www.tuxtops.com/Documentation/quickstart_debian.htm

9. http://auric.debian.org/~tausq/newpkgs-20001003.html

10. http://www.debian.org/Packages/unstable/mail/aeromail.html

11. http://www.debian.org/Packages/unstable/devel/sather.html

12.
http://www.debian.org/Packages/unstable/devel/sather-browser.html

13. http://www.debian.org/Packages/unstable/devel/sather-doc.html