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From: Martin Schulze <joey@infodrom.org>
To: Debian News Channel <debian-news@lists.debian.org>
Subject: Debian Weekly News - January 9th, 2002
Date: Wed, 9 Jan 2002 21:06:54 +0100
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Debian Weekly News
http://www.debian.org/News/weekly/2002/2/
Debian Weekly News - January 9th, 2002
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Welcome to the second issue of Debian Weekly News, the weekly
newsletter for the Debian community.
New "Debian on CD" Web Pages. A new set of [1]web pages about Debian
on CD-ROMs was added to [2]www.debian.org. They finally replace the
old pages on [3]cdimage.debian.org, which were often criticised by
visitors of the website. Apart from an extended FAQ, the new pages
offer direct download links for CD images, a list of CD vendors and
artwork to use for your home-made CD covers. Additionally, they
provide information about [4]jigdo ("Jigsaw Download"), the new
distribution scheme for downloading CD images from any normal Debian
mirror.
Last week, Ivan E. More II, our well-known and fearless KDE maintainer
orphaned most of the KDE and Qt packages he maintained. He feels that
he can no longer afford enough time to work on these packages
properly, deal with real life and the unique stress that is caused by
being a Debian Developer. Thanks for your good work Ivan. Chris Cheney
and Daniel Stone took over most of his packages, so KDE and Qt are
maintained again. They are trying to resolve current problems with
libpng2/3, so please bear with them.
Commenting on Debian Development. Adrian Bunk wrote a long [5]mail in
which he talks about several issues with Debian that have arisen as a
result of our development process. Adrian complains about maintainers
who have become difficult to deal with and the project's inability to
force a maintainer to do certain requested tasks because of their
volunteer status, the sheer amount of more than [6]8000 binary
packages, the number of more than 900 maintainers, our release
process, the development process (which is also known as "bazaar of
small cathedrals") and the number of release critical bugs. Fabian
Fagerholm [7]added: "Where before we had chaos and charismatic people
hacking away into the night, we now have people striving for orderly
development of mature systems."
Restructuring Debian Quality Assurance. The Debian QA team (Quality
Assurance) is discussing improvements and new structures for their
work. Adrian Bunk for example [8]talks about forming teams and tasks
for QA such as fixing release critical (RC) bugs, discovering packages
that can not be installed, [9]problems with testing and determining
maintainers that are missing in action (MIA). Raphaël Hertzog
[10]announced a new service for people who would like to help with
package maintenance by subscribing to a packages' bug reports.
Additionally, the QA team already prepared lists of RC bugs with
priority [11]base and [12]standard.
New Debian-Med Project. Andreas Tille felt he had to start a new
project in this new year. [13]Debian-Med is an internal project in
Debian (like [14]Debian Jr.) that supports tasks of people in medical
care. Debian-Med will have two main components: Support for general
practice and laboratory research. Andreas is looking for other people
to help him in packaging, maintaining and documenting.
Helping With Unfixable Bugs. Colin Watson extracted a [15]list of bug
reports that have tag 'help' set. The maintainer obviously asked for
help fixing these bugs. If you're looking for some good challenging
bugs to attack, these might be worthwhile targets. Send information or
patches as appropriate.
Acronyms and Technical Words cause Trouble. In translation of
documentation, Debian related IRC channels and mailing lists, many
translators, users and developers still get stuck with some acronyms,
technical words and jargon. These terms are difficult to translate and
partially difficult to understand if one doesn't grok their meaning
yet. For example, neither "debless" (seems to be "disable")" nor
"cruft" (is meant to be "garbage") in the powerpc part of
boot-floppies documentation exists in an English dictionary. MIA
(Missing In Action, see above), IMHO, OTOH etc. are greek to some
newbie users and developers.
Debian 2.2r5. Martin 'Joey' Schulze is [16]preparing the fifth point
release of Potato. It includes numerous bug fixes and renders some
previously uninstallable packages installable. Most of the bug fixes
are security related, so be sure to upgrade once the new point release
hits the mirrors. DWN will of course announce it once 2.2r5 is out.
New or Noteworthy Packages. The following new or updated packages were
updated or added to the Debian archive recently.
* [17]peacock -- A HTML Editor for GTK+/GNOME.
* [18]admwebuser -- Manage Squid or Web users using a Web browser .
* [19]alml -- A SGML typesetting system.
* [20]bayonne -- Telephony server of the GNU project.
* [21]curator -- Turn directories of images into static web content.
* [22]ktouch -- A program for learning touch typing.
* [23]mindi -- Creates boot/root disks based on your system.
* [24]pload -- Program to monitor network device statistics.
* [25]po-utils -- Tool collection for handling PO files.
* [26]mconfig -- Kernel configuration tool.
* [27]molphy -- Program Package for Molecular Phylogenetics.
* [28]multiticker -- GNOME applet to provide scrolling RDF/RSS news
tickers.
* [29]sbuild -- A tool for building Debian binary packages from
Debian sources.
* [30]siege -- HTTP regression testing and benchmarking utility.
* [31]tina -- A curses personal information manager.
Security Updates. You know the drill, make sure you update your
systems if you have one of these packages installed.
* [32]Mutt -- Buffer overflow.
* [33]Exim -- Uncontrolled program execution.
* [34]libgtop -- Format string vulnerability and buffer overflow.
Orphaned Packages. This is a new section. Let's find out if we can
provide weekly updates or not. Many packages were orphaned last week.
However many of them were taken over by a new maintainer already.
Please see the [35]WNPP pages for the full list.
* [36]chastity-list ([37]Bug#127700) -- Blacklists for SquidGuard
* [38]squidguard ([39]Bug#127704) -- Filter, redirector and access
controller plug for Squid
Got news? Please inform us if you do. We are always looking for more
interesting content to add, especially new items by voluntary writers.
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References
1. http://www.debian.org/CD/
2. http://www.debian.org/
3. http://cdimage.debian.org/
4. http://atterer.net/jigdo/
5. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-0201/msg00199.html
6. http://www.debian.gr.jp/~kitame/maint.cgi
7. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-0201/msg00214.html
8. http://lists.debian.org/debian-qa-0111/msg00244.html
9. http://ftp-master.debian.org/testing/testing_probs.html
10. http://lists.debian.org/debian-qa-0201/msg00062.html
11. http://base.debian.net/
12. http://standard.debian.net/
13. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-0201/msg00454.html
14. http://www.debian.org/devel/debian-jr/
15. http://lists.debian.org/debian-qa-0201/msg00093.html
16. http://people.debian.org/~joey/2.2r5/
17. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/devel/peacock.html
18. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/web/admwebuser.html
19. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/doc/alml.html
20. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/comm/bayonne.html
21. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/web/curator.html
22. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/games/ktouch.html
23. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/utils/mindi.html
24. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/net/pload.html
25. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/devel/po-utils.html
26. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/utils/mconfig.html
27. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/science/molphy.html
28. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/x11/multiticker.html
29. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/devel/sbuild.html
30. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/web/siege.html
31. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/misc/tina.html
32. http://www.debian.org/security/2001/dsa-096
33. http://www.debian.org/security/2001/dsa-097
34. http://www.debian.org/security/2001/dsa-098
35. http://www.debian.org/devel/wnpp/
36. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/web/chastity-list.html
37. http://bugs.debian.org/127700
38. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/web/squidguard.html
39. http://bugs.debian.org/127704
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