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Date: Tue, 19 Dec 2000 22:37:16 -0800
To: debian-news@lists.debian.org
Subject: Debian Weekly News - December 19th, 2000

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Debian Weekly News
http://www.debian.org/News/weekly/2000/41/
Debian Weekly News - December 19th, 2000
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Welcome to a special edition of Debian Weekly News. We had planned to
skip this week for a vacation, but Debian never sleeps...

Testing has entered the main Debian archive. Testing is a new branch
of Debian to complement stable and unstable. New uploads enter
unstable, and if no bad bugs are found in two weeks time, flow into
testing. Thus, testing is always in an "essentially releasable state".
Now that package pools exist, it was not too hard to [1]make testing a
part of the main archive. Woody has now been designated as testing and
populated with packages from stable, with updates that the code behind
testing thinks is safe (so if you have "woody" in sources.list, you'll
probably run into [2]this problem). Testing is sure to have
far-ranging implications throughout Debian, from package release
frequency and everyday development, to porting and security fixes, to
release timing and management. Interesting times lie ahead.

Now that woody == testing, how's it doing? Release manager Anthony
Towns made a "[3] state of the woody address". Important upgrades
like glibc 2.2, X 4.0.1, and perl 5.6 are not in woody/testing yet,
but they soon may be. Unsurprisingly, both the number of packages and
the number of open bugs have increased since potato was released.
Anthony's main concern is that the new debian-installer project is not
ready yet, and the old boot floppies need several months of work to be
usable for woody. A related thread discussed other [4]goals for woody
Putting all this together, Anthony projects a freeze in May, with a
release in June -- though he cautions: "Presumably it'll end up
getting extended since nothing ever goes to plan."

Fixing Debian's buggy vote counting methods has been the topic of
discussion on debian-vote for several weeks. The few people who have
been involved in the discussion all agree that there are [5]some
ambiguities in the constitution that, if triggered, could make a vote
unresolvable. A [6]proposed fix for the problems turned out to have
an [7]obscure bug of its own. Since this discussion is becoming
increasingly arcane and off-topic for debian-vote and increasingly
on-topic for the [8]Election Methods mailing list, a [9]joint
committee is forming, made up of interested people from both lists.
They will discuss "all the problems with decision-making process [...]
in the current constitution", and develop a proposal about how to fix
them. Of course the final decision about adopting the proposal will be
made by Debian.

Security fixes in the past week include a nasty [10]privilege
escalation bug in zope, a [11]local exploit in slocate, and the
symlink attacks against editors continue with [12]one in nano.

Debian Weekly News will be back next week with a more complete summary
of ongoing Debian discussion and development.

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References
  1. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-0012/msg01640.html
  2. http://lists.debian.org/debian-user-0012/msg03358.html
  3. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce-0012/msg00012.html
  4. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-0012/msg01739.html
  5. http://lists.debian.org/debian-vote-0012/msg00090.html
  6. http://lists.debian.org/debian-vote-0012/msg00090.html
  7. http://lists.debian.org/debian-vote-0012/msg00106.html
  8. http://www.eskimo.com/~robla/em/
  9. http://lists.debian.org/debian-vote-0012/msg00091.html
  10. http://www.debian.org/security/2000/20001219
  11. http://www.debian.org/security/2000/20001217a
  12. http://www.debian.org/security/2000/20001217

-- 
see shy jo


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