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From:	 Wichert Akkerman <wichert@cistron.nl>
To:	 debian-devel-announce@lists.debian.org
Subject: dpkg 1.9.0 release
Date:	 Fri, 27 Apr 2001 22:58:37 +0200


As you may have noticed a new dpkg release hit the archives today:
after months of work version 1.9.0 is finally ready. This release
has the usual number changes and fixes a nice 90 bug reports in the
bug tracking system. All the details are listed in the changelog
of course, but I have put the highlights below.

Bug fixes:
* a few uninitialized variables are fixed. This should fix all the
  segmentation faults that people have been reporting
* there was a problem in the loop-breaking code that dealt with
  virtual packages, which caused package relation checking to fail.
  This should fix the failed `dependtry > 4' assertions.
* a couple of memory leaks were fixed
* dselect will not abort on window resizing anymore
* a race in dpkg-source with a disappearing directory was fixed. This
  fixed all the `cannot get cwd' warnings.

Improvements:
* most of the file-reading code has been changed to use mmap
  or buffered IO instead of reading data per character. This is a 33%
  speedup on reading the dpkg database.
* All translations have been updated and should be more complete now
* The dselect menu code has been changed to be better translatable
* With the improved largemem code dpkg now has smallmem actually used
  more memory, so it was removed.
* A few changes were made to please the Hurd (most noticeably ENOENT
  is no longer hard-coded in perl scripts and dpkg calls scripts with
  absolute pathnames).
* Adam Heath is an active dpkg developer now

New features:
* a Danish translation was added
* there is a new --status-pipe option to allow a parent process to
  monitor the dpkg status
* works fine on Linux/HPPA, Linux/IA64 and Linux/SH now. Or at least
  it would be if gcc did not get an internal compiler error on code
  that uses the %zi printf format string.
* dpkg-gencontrol has a new -n option to specify the filename of the
  package to generate. This means that you no longer need (or should)
  mess around with debian/rules when creating udebs
* dpkg-checkbuilddeps added to check build dependencies. dpkg-buildpackage
  will also call this now.
* dpkg-gencontrol will fix syntax errors in fields that are the result
  of variables that expanded to an empty string (the famous ", ,"
  problem)
* the dpkg -L, -S, -l, -s and -p options now return an error code if
  a queries package does not exist, so you can easily use those in
  a script to check if a package is installed.
* dpkg-genchanges will no longer abort if not all packages listed in
  debian/control are build, so it is possible to build optional packages
  without a lot of 

Wichert.
-- 
  _________________________________________________________________
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