From:	 Martin Schulze <joey@infodrom.org>
To:	 Debian News Channel <debian-news@lists.debian.org>
Subject: Debian Weekly News - January 16th, 2002
Date:	 Wed, 16 Jan 2002 20:57:15 +0100

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Debian Weekly News
http://www.debian.org/News/weekly/2002/3/
Debian Weekly News - January 16th, 2002
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Welcome to this year's third issue of Debian Weekly News, the weekly
newsletter for the Debian community. We hope you enjoyed the last
week. A lot of things happened. This week we proudly include two items
by a new voluntary writer: Yooseong Yang.

Sponsors Needed. Raphaël Hertzog [1]reminded us that Debian needs more
sponsors to look after packages from prospective future maintainers.
The sponsorship system offers official Debian developers help future
maintainers by checking their packages, giving them advice, and
uploading their packages into Debian before they have finished the
new-maintainer process. Currently, there are about 30 people
[2]looking for a sponsor.

Libpng 2/3 Problems Resolved? Daniel Stone [3]reported that former
problems with libpng2/libpng3 should be resolved with the recently
uploaded kdebase, kdegraphics and kdenetwork packages. Earlier he
[4]explained the problem: Ivan decided that libpng3 was the way
forward for libqt2 people, but then Chris decided that libqt2 should
stay with libpng2, while libqt3 should use libpng3.

Improving QA Work. Adrian Bunk [5]discussed details about the
[6]proposal he made last year. He is going to publish the final list
of tasks soon, and will be looking for volunteers to claim
responsibility for particular tasks. Later Edward Betts [7]wondered
when the `help' tag should be used in the Bug Tracking System (BTS).
Torsten Landschoff quickly [8]implemented a modified LDAP gateway to
the BTS, in order to make it easier to extract tagged bugs.

Problems with GNU Chess. It has been [9]said that compiling this
package can take several days on ARM and M68k machines. This is
problematic since it locks the build machine for a while. Philip
Blundell wondered how architecture-specific the chess datafiles are.
Perhaps the build process could be modified, so that these files can
go into an architecture-independent package and don't have to be
regenerated each time.

Chroot Environment for Debian NetBSD. Matthew Garrett [10]announced
the availability of a chroot environment to help develop Debian on a
native NetBSD system. After installing this and chroot'ing into it,
you'll be able to use the power of both systems and should be able to
start building preliminary packages. Matthew compiled a [11]web page
which contains further instructions and a todo list.

Public QA Logbook? The Quality Assurance Team (QA) is currently
[12]discussing a public logbook covering their work. It would probably
be a good idea to make QA work more visible and credit the people who
are actually doing QA work. Perhaps somebody who watches mails sent to
the BTS and QA lists would like to compile a weekly or monthly QA
progress report?

Debian Documentation Format. Recently, Cliff [13]posted an important
article related to writing documentation. He mentioned several
documentation types in his article: [14]aft, Docbook, LaTeX, and so
on. However, he preferred a simple ASCII format. For Debian, John R.
Daily [15]proposed using DocBook/XML as documentation format instead
of SGML (and manual pages). We should address this problem: what
Documentation Type Definition (DTD) is useful for both Debian
developers and users?

OpenPKG versus APT. OpenPKG 1.0 is a cross-platform Unix software
packaging tool based on RPM, which was [16]released recently. Some
people [17]discussed features of this and the Debian package tool.
Jörg Wendland suggested several new functions embedded in APT or in a
wrapper around it, mainly to make maintenance of large pools of
similar Debian machine easier. These features include remote
installation, deinstallation and reconfiguration of software.

Renaming Stale ITPs to RFP. Bas Zoetekouw [18]proposed to rename ITP
(Intent to Package) bugs into RFP (Request for Packaging) bugs if the
bug report hasn't had any activity in the last 100 days. His list
contains more than 300 items, which means more than 300 pieces of
software that people wanted to package but didn't upload for a long
while. Thomas Bushnell [19]proposed closing the bug right away, if the
last activity was the QA question asking for a status report.

Vanishing /usr/doc Symlink. Julian Gilbey upgraded and lost -- or won.
He [20]wondered why the /usr/doc symlink was gone after the upgrade.
Santiago Vila [21]explained that he had just upgraded the last package
that came with a file in the /usr/doc directory, as described in the
[22]transition plan from August 1999.

Fifth Release of Potato. Martin 'Joey' Schulze [23]announced the fifth
release of Debian 2.2 (codename 'potato'). This is mainly a security
update, while some serious bugs have also been fixed. Some important
security updates are PHP4, INN2, Apache, OpenSSH, Postfix, Mailman,
GPM, mutt and Exim. Also, important packages such as modconf and
postgresql have been updated. Joey has a [24]complete list, the
[25]changelog and the [26]non-US changelog. If you haven't done so in
a while, be sure to run apt-get update && apt-get upgrade. An
[27]update CD should already be available on cdimage.debian.org.

New or Noteworthy Packages. The following new or updated packages were
updated or added to the Debian archive recently.
 * [28]ppthtml -- A program for converting Microsoft Power Point
   Files.
 * [29]xlhtml -- A program for converting Microsoft Excel Files.
 * [30]debpartial -- Debian Packages/Sources file partition tool.
 * [31]elpoint -- Yet another presentation tool on Emacsen.
 * [32]eroaster -- The ECLiPt CD Roaster.
 * [33]ferite -- Ferite programming language.
 * [34]gnue-forms -- An XML-based formular generator for GTK+ and
   curses.
 * [35]mwavem -- Mwave/ACP modem support for some Thinkpad notebooks.
 * [36]sfftw2 -- Library for computing Fast Fourier Transforms on
   Intel P4.
 * [37]showimg -- A feature-rich image viewer.
 * [38]txt2regex -- A Regular Expression "wizard", all written with
   bash2 builtins.

Security Updates. You know the drill, make sure you update your
systems if you have any of these packages installed.
 * [39]XChat -- IRC session hijacking.
 * [40]gzip -- Potential buffer overflow.
 * [41]sudo -- Local root exploit.
 * [42]at -- Local daemon exploit.
 * [43]glibc -- Buffer overflow.
 * [44]CIPE -- DoS attack.

Orphaned Packages. Some packages were orphaned last week. This makes
it total 102 packages that are orphaned. Please see the [45]WNPP pages
for the full list.
 * [46]cgiemail ([47]Bug#129109) -- CGI Form-to-Mail converter
 * [48]epan ([49]Bug#127974) -- Offline ethernet protocol analyzer
 * [50]gphoto2 ([51]Bug#129352) -- The gphoto2 digital camera library

Got news? Please inform us about everything that's going on in the
Debian community. We are always looking for more interesting stories
to add, especially new items by voluntary writers.

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References
  1. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce-0201/msg00003.html
  2. http://www.internatif.org/bortzmeyer/debian/sponsor/
  3. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-0201/msg00725.html
  4. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-0201/msg00622.html
  5. http://lists.debian.org/debian-qa-0201/msg00105.html
  6. http://lists.debian.org/debian-qa-0111/msg00244.html
  7. http://lists.debian.org/debian-qa-0201/msg00129.html
  8. http://lists.debian.org/debian-qa-0201/msg00133.html
  9. http://lists.debian.org/debian-68k-0201/msg00013.html
  10. http://lists.debian.org/debian-bsd-0201/msg00000.html
  11. http://www.srcf.ucam.org/~mjg59/debian-netbsd/
  12. http://lists.debian.org/debian-qa-0201/msg00141.html
  13. http://slashdot.org/developers/02/01/10/1856232.shtml
  14. http://www.maplefish.com/todd/aft.html
  15. http://lists.debian.org/debian-doc-0112/msg00076.html
  16. http://slashdot.org/articles/02/01/11/1332252.shtml
  17. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-0201/msg00830.html
  18. http://lists.debian.org/debian-qa-0201/msg00149.html
  19. http://lists.debian.org/debian-qa-0201/msg00155.html
  20. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-0201/msg01008.html
  21. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-0201/msg01016.html
  22. http://lists.debian.org/debian-ctte-9908/msg00038.html
  23. http://lists.debian.org/debian-announce/debian-announce-2002/msg00000.html
  24. http://people.debian.org/~joey/2.2r5/
  25. http://http.us.debian.org/debian/dists/Debian2.2r5/ChangeLog
  26. http://non-us.debian.org/debian-non-US/dists/Debian2.2r5/non-US/ChangeLog
  27. http://lists.debian.org/debian-cd-0201/msg00123.html
  28. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/utils/ppthtml.html
  29. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/utils/xlhtml.html
  30. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/admin/debpartial.html
  31. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/x11/elpoint.html
  32. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/otherosfs/eroaster.html
  33. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/devel/ferite.html
  34. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/interpreters/gnue-forms.html
  35. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/utils/mwavem.html
  36. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/libs/sfftw2.html
  37. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/graphics/showimg.html
  38. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/utils/txt2regex.html
  39. http://www.debian.org/security/2002/dsa-099
  40. http://www.debian.org/security/2002/dsa-100
  41. http://www.debian.org/security/2002/dsa-101
  42. http://www.debian.org/security/2002/dsa-102
  43. http://www.debian.org/security/2002/dsa-103
  44. http://www.debian.org/security/2002/dsa-104
  45. http://www.debian.org/devel/wnpp/
  46. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/web/cgiemail.html
  47. http://bugs.debian.org/129109
  48. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/net/epan.html
  49. http://bugs.debian.org/127974
  50. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/libs/gphoto2.html
  51. http://bugs.debian.org/129352


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