From:	 Debian Weekly News <dwn@debian.org>
To:	 debian-news@lists.debian.org
Subject: Debian Weekly News - June 11th, 2001
Date:	 12 Jun 2001 15:30:11 +0200


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Debian Weekly News
http://www.debian.org/News/weekly/2001/14/
Debian Weekly News - June 11th, 2001
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master.debian.org was down several days this week, with hard drive
problems. Master hosts the Debian bug tracking system, @debian.org
email addresses, mailing list archives, and other [1]crucial systems,
all of which were interrupted by the down-time.

While the Debian Project doesn't have all of its server eggs in one
basket these days, a failure of master can still nearly paralyze the
project. Even updates to the testing distribution halted since the BTS
was not accessible. (And it disrupted preparations for DWN, making
this issue late.) Most of master's drives turned out to be ok, and no
data was lost from master.

A few messages to @debian.org addresses, including the BTS, did
bounce, and anyone who submitted a bug this week only to get a bounce
back is encouraged to resubmit it.

One hundred thousand bugs have passed through the Debian Bug Tracking
System now -- bug [2]#100000 was filed on June 7th, 2001.
Unfortunately, few marked the occasion with fanfare as planned since
the BTS was down at the time. Some developers on IRC celebrated the
bug with a special bot by Joey Hess.

Of the 100,000 bugs, fewer than 19 thousand remain open - that's 2 to
3 bugs per package, on average. The oldest open bug, [3]#710, was
filed 5 years ago, and the most famous bug may be [4]#6518.

Debian's bug tracking system is more than a catalog of problems, it's
a huge body of knowledge that's used for historical reference as well.
Especially for things like the testing distribution, and so on.

We're proud of our BTS, nasty bugs and all, and it even plays an
important role in our [5]Social Contract. A big thank you is surely
deserved by both the developers who fixed those countless thousands of
bugs, and the users who took the time to make Debian better by
reporting them! If the number of bugs reported continues to be
approximately linear with time (as shown in this [6]graph), the
already unwieldy bug numbers shouldn't get any bigger until early May,
2028.

MOSIX is in unstable. [7]MOSIX is a scalable, multi-platform,
transparent load balancing tool. Very nice, and is now available as
Debian packages.

Intent to Rewrite: pwgen. Theodore Ts'o [8]intends to rewrite pwgen,
a password generator, because of the license problems with it. This is
a very welcome initiative, and multiple suggestions for improvements
have already surfaced.

Experimental Python packages have been [9]released, and Gregor
Hoffleit has asked for help with auditing the packages that depend on
Python.

LinuxTag CD Preview available. The first preview of the CD for
LinuxTag in Germany is ready. It consists of potato boot-floppies and
packages from woody and sid. It seems to work, but is a preliminary
version.

LinuxWorld Expo 2001/Tokyo. We got a report from Junichi Uekawa about
Debian's presence on LinuxWorld in Tokyo. Members of the Debian
Project were present and showing Debian on Macintosh Classic and
PlayStation 2, among others.

Freezing Woody. Policy is [10]more or less frozen and will only be
updated if there are important bugfixes or changes, Julian Gilbey
announced. Also, [11]Anthony Towns posted an updated progress report
basically saying that we are not ready to freeze yet.

New kde.debian.net server Ivan Moore [12]announced that there would be
a new site for Debian KDE packages with a round of 2.1.x packages for
Potato comiing soon.

NewbieDoc News:

The NewbieDoc folks sent us this update - thanks guys!

Jesse Goerz has been busy working on automating our build process with
custom dsssl stylesheets; Roman Lerallut and Tom Huckstep have been
working on automating our build process with shell scripts.

John Eisenstein has been reviewing every document that comes out of
the group, paying careful attention to the content and structure of
each sentence, and finding ways to deal with an international spread.

You can join our effort and contribute a NewbieDoc or some technical
pointers -- join as a sourceForge.net member, and send a message to
newbiedoc-discuss@lists.sourceforge.net!

Newbie Tip:
Are you a writer? Learn DocBook so you can write ONCE -- and then
render your work to PDF, to HTML, to PostScript, to plain text... Just
"apt-get install sgmltools-2" to get started, and learn about it at
[13]www.docbook.org.

As always feel free to drop the Debian Weekly News editorial team a
note with comments, suggestions or news tips to [14]dwn@debian.org

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References
  1. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce-0106/msg00002.html
  2. http://bugs.debian.org/100000
  3. http://bugs.debian.org/710
  4. http://bugs.debian.org/6518
  5. http://www.debian.org/social_contract
  6. http://www.debian.org/News/weekly/2001/14/bts.png
  7. http://lists.debian.org/debian-beowulf-0105/msg00069.html
  8. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-0105/msg02177.html
  9. http://lists.debian.org/debian-python-0105/msg00019.html
  10. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce-0106/msg00003.html
  11. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce-0106/msg00001.html
  12. http://lists.debian.org/debian-kde-0106/msg00000.html
  13. http://www.docbook.org/
  14. mailto:dwn@debian.org

-- 
Debian Weekly News is edited by 
Joe 'Zonker' Brockmeier, Jean-Christophe Helary and Tollef Fog Heen


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