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From:	 Martin Schulze <joey@infodrom.org>
To:	 Debian News Channel <debian-news@lists.debian.org>
Subject: Debian Weekly News - January 1st, 2002
Date:	 Wed, 2 Jan 2002 20:12:30 +0100

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Debian Weekly News
http://www.debian.org/News/weekly/2002/1/
Debian Weekly News - January 1st, 2002
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Happy New Year! Welcome to the new year 2002 and the first issue of
Debian Weekly News for this term. We hope that you have survived all
New Years parties and are feeling well again. Let's start the new year
with responsible development and improvements of Free Software and
Free Documentation. As a sidenote: the DWN team could also use one or
two more people who submit entire items, so volunteers are welcome.

Net Installation for Woody. Ian Eure developed some special [1]CD
images for a woody network installation for i386 and powerpc. The
images don't contain full 650MB of packages (which you don't even use
entirely), but contain a basic Debian system, which is bootable. Once
the image is booted it will guide the user through the Debian
installation procedure until he has reached the step where he has to
set up APT. From that step the installation will continue using the
network as expected. Use these images at your own risk. If you send
Ian a polite mail at ieure@debian.org, he will try to help with any
problems you might have.

GRSecurity and Debian. Jonathan McDowell [2]took over the GRSecurity
kernel patch from Russell Coker. [3]GRSecurity is a patch to 2.4.x
kernels for extra security. It adds the ability to hide from many
types of port scans and filtering out certain information from network
transfers. It limits access to data in /proc such that a regular user
can only see their own processes and can't see important network data
(ifconfig output is truncated) or dmesg output. Also it severely
limits operations in chroot jails to prevent programs from escaping
and includes a port of all the OpenWall code. Preliminary packages are
[4]here.

Pinning Unstable. Have you ever heard of the pinning feature of recent
versions of apt-get? For all those who are using woody (aka testing)
but would like to use some packages from unstable, this feature will
help. Take evolution as an example, since it is currently only
available in unstable. Grant Bowman sent us a [5]description for this
feature.

Counting Potatos. Jesus Gonzalez-Barahona is part of a group
interested in measuring some aspects of software maintained by the
Debian project. They have been [6]counting the number of physical
source lines of code (SLOC) in several Debian distributions. A paper
covering this has been published in the Upgrade Magazine. Here's an
interesting quote from the abstract: "It is also shown that if Debian
had been developed using traditional proprietary methods, the
[7]COCOMO model estimates that its cost would be close to $1.9
billion USD to develop Debian 2.2."

Adding Three More SuperH Architectures? Takeshi Yaegashi [8]discussed
additional architectures based on variants of the SuperH processor. To
support all of them, it may be required to provide binaries for four
SuperH architectures in unstable: sh3, sh4 and their big [9]endian
versions. It is questionable if the user base will be large enough to
justify three more architectures, though. Yutaka Niibe [10]explained
in detail which differences and history these processers come with.

Retrospect of DDTP. At the end of the last year Michael Bramer posted
a [11]review of the Debian Description Translation Project (DDTP)
which he founded. His report does not only contain a current status
report but also talks about his plans for the future. Two Debian
mirror servers already support translated packages descriptions so the
translation effort is already in use by some users.

Porting Volunteers Needed. Phil Blundell recently [12]asked for more
volunteers helping with the ARM port of Debian. This port needs more
volunteers to examine build failures, fix and file bugs as
appropriate. Since the release of Woody comes nearer and there are
quite a few packages that don't build properly on all architectures,
help is really needed. This is also the main problem the M68k port
suffers from. We may lose that port one day, not because of too few
machines that don't keep up with the number of packages, but because
there are not enough people actually porting and fixing things.

Multiple Boot Images on Woody CD. Jim Westveer [13]announced the
ability to put 5 boot images on the first woody-i386 CD/ROM. With a
i386-woody CD#1, and a newer BIOS in your computer, the CD will boot,
and present you with a menu of what 'flavor' of kernel image you wish
to boot with. On an older BIOS, CD#1 will simply boot the 'default'
kernel.

Bug Reporting in Non-Commercial Software. Seth LaForge [14]wrote an
article for Linux Weekly News (LWN) about using the Debian Bug
Tracking System (BTS) emphasizing how easy it can be used. Looking at
the current number of reported bugs in the BTS our users and
developers are using the BTS to its full extent in order to report
bugs in the software and thus helping improving the software, both in
Debian and upstream.

Three Developers Required for a Package? Janos Lenart prepared a
[15]proposal modifying the upload policy for new packages. His
concerns refer to the bloat in Debian, since he believes that there
are so many unneeded, unused and unmaintained packages. He would like
to make it more complicated for developers to upload new packages.
While he didn't make many people happy, Raphaël Hertzog [16]finetuned
the proposal.

Debian GNU/Linux or Debian GNU or Debian? Jeroen Dekkers
[17]complained about developers who write Debian GNU/Linux when they
mean a Debian system instead. That's a common mistake that hurts the
fledgling [18]Hurd port. Hurd people are probably going to file quite
a few bug reports about this.

New or Noteworthy Packages. The following new or updated packages were
updated or added to the Debian archive recently.
 * [19]apt-show-versions -- Lists available package versions with
   distribution. (Read [20]more)
 * [21]apt-file -- APT package searching utility -- command-line
   interface.
 * [22]libnet-jabber-perl -- Perl modules for accessing the Jabber
   protocol.
 * [23]mh-e -- The GNU Emacs front end for MH and nmh mail user
   agents.
 * [24]python-oss -- Open Sound System (OSS) interface for Python.

Security Updates. You know the drill, make sure you update your
systems if you have one of these packages installed.

 * [25]gpm -- Local root vulnerability.

Got news? Please tell us. We are looking forward to adding more
interesting items by voluntary writers.

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References
  1. http://people.debian.org/~ieure/netinst/
  2. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-0112/msg02046.html
  3. http://www.grsecurity.net/
  4. http://www.earth.li/~noodles/grsec/
  5. http://www.debian.org/News/weekly/2002/1/mail#1
  6. http://people.debian.org/~jgb/debian-counting
  7. http://foldoc.doc.ic.ac.uk/foldoc/foldoc.cgi?COCOMO
  8. http://lists.debian.org/debian-superh-0112/msg00013.html
  9. http://www.foldoc.org/foldoc/foldoc.cgi?query=endian
  10. http://lists.debian.org/debian-superh-0112/msg00017.html
  11. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce-0112/msg00011.html
  12. http://lists.debian.org/debian-arm-0112/msg00014.html
  13. http://lists.debian.org/debian-cd-0112/msg00117.html
  14. http://lists.debian.org/debian-debbugs-0111/msg00000.html
  15. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-0112/msg02176.html
  16. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-0112/msg02192.html
  17. http://lists.debian.org/debian-hurd-0112/msg00233.html
  18. http://www.debian.org/ports/hurd/
  19. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/admin/apt-show-versions.html
  20. http://www.debian.org/News/weekly/2002/1/mail#2
  21. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/admin/apt-file.html
  22. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/interpreters/libnet-jabber-perl.html
  23. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/mail/mh-e.html
  24. http://packages.debian.org/sound/python-oss.html
  25. http://www.debian.org/security/2001/dsa-095


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