From:	 Martin Schulze <joey@infodrom.org>
To:	 Debian News Channel <debian-news@lists.debian.org>
Subject: Debian Weekly News - February 20th, 2002
Date:	 Wed, 20 Feb 2002 20:29:52 +0100

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Debian Weekly News
http://www.debian.org/News/weekly/2002/8/
Debian Weekly News - February 20th, 2002
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Welcome to this year's eighth issue of DWN, the weekly newsletter to
the Debian community. We've received promising news with regard to the
Woody release, but please see below. In case you've missed this week's
flamebait on our release structure, here's the [1]link to the thread.

 1. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-0202/msg01069.html

New Upload System. James Troup finally [2]revealed the gory details of
the new structure and implementation of the Incoming directories into
which new packages are uploaded, before they are processed and
installed into the Debian archive. The main advantage of this change
is that only the packages will be publically visible through
[3]incoming.debian.org, are those to be installed by the next archive
run. This change was required to let crypto-enabled software enter the
main archive. It is installed on the non-US server and will eventually
be installed on ftp-master after it has proven stability.

 2. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce-0202/msg00006.html
 3. http://incoming.debian.org/

Debian on Top of Sun Solaris. John Groenveld started a [4]discussion
covering a Debian system running within a Solaris box. However, his
proposal does not include running Debian natively on the architecture
but in SunPC/bochs. This would open Sun's customers the world of Linux
binaries and more applications, even on the non-x86 architecture, that
other companies don't plan to support with their applications.
Somebody else [5]added an interesting view about the Debian project:
"Their [the package maintainers] personal reputation is on the line if
a package isn't updated/fixed/etc."

 4. http://groups.yahoo.com/group/solarisonintel/message/30553
 5. http://groups.yahoo.com/group/solarisonintel/message/30574

New Stable Revision (r6) in Preparation. In another quixotic attempt,
Joey is again [6]working on an update to the stable Debian version
(alias 2.2). The list of packages contains no less than eleven
security uploads currently. Joey's plan is to get the sixth revision
out at the beginning of March. However the new incoming system could
put a spoke into this wheel. If you would like to add a comment to the
list, please drop him a line.

 6. http://master.debian.org/~joey/2.2r6/

Unofficial Woody Image for Mini CDs. Ho-seok Lee developed an
unofficial small CD image for the i386 architecture that fits on a
3.5" CD which takes about 180MB. The image was created manually and
contains [7]280 Debian packages including packages like Sawfish,
IceWM, XMMS and the Linux kernel 2.4.17 supporting ReiserFS, Ext3FS
and the PPPoE module for ADSL users. This entire image can be
downloaded from [8]here.

 7. http://www.debian.or.kr/~alee/cdimages/woody.list.txt
 8. http://www.debian.or.kr/~alee/cdimages/woody.iso

Woody Release Status. Anthony Towns sent in a new [9]status report
about the upcoming Woody release. The good news are that the base
system is back in good shape. There are still bugs in some important
packages, but most of these seem fairly controllable. The bad news are
that several packages still come with release critical (RC) bugs which
means that they will be getting randomly ripped out of testing. If
packages you're interested in having accumulated RC bugs the
maintainer and you have almost run out of time to get them fixed if
you want them released.

 9. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce-0202/msg00012.html

SPAM on Debian Lists. The mailing lists, that the Debian project
provides, are open and anybody can send mail to most of them. Since
their addresses are publically available, they are abused by spammers
as well, unfortunately. There is not much we can do about this besides
trying to filter out as much as we can and closing the lists. While we
are already doing the first, we won't do the latter. We appreciate
people complaining about spammers, but please, please, please think
thrice about where you are sending the complaint to. Here is yet
another [10]example of a subscriber of a Debian owned mailing list
filing spam complaints against [11]Brainfood for spam on Debian lists.

 10. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-0202/msg01014.html
 11. http://www.brainfood.com/

Autobuilding Debian? Have you ever wondered if it would be possible to
rebuild all Debian packages from source? Theoretically speaking, this
should be possible. Many packages provide Build-Depends that describe
which packages need to be installed before a package can be built.
Junichi Uekawa [12]used an Athlon 900 with 512 MB of memory that tried
to rebuild all Debian packages. 4114 packages were built successfully
while 375 packages didn't. That's pretty impressive.

 12. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-0202/msg01190.html

Report From Last Weekends Bug-Squashing Party. Colin Watson
[13]reports that the seventh Bug-Squashing Party (BSP) attracted a
substantial number of existing developers, applicants, and users. The
release critical (RC) bug count has dropped from 442 on Friday morning
to the current level of 331, a large amount of which was due to
bug-squashers providing patches and/or Non-Maintainer-Uploads (NMUs).
The delayed incoming directory currently contains fixes for 72 bugs
(many of them are RC).

 13. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce-0202/msg00013.html

Mirrors Recovering after the Rsync Breakage. Josip Rodin [14]reports
that most Debian mirrors recuperated automatically after the last
rsync breakage. This was anticipated since rsync was fixed a while ago
and should detect broken files. He also tells us that there are
currently 290 officially registered Debian mirrors. All mirror
maintainers are encouraged to investigate what's been [15]changed
since the last time they checked.

 14. http://www.debian.org/News/weekly/2002/8/mail#1
 15. http://www.debian.org/mirror/

New or Noteworthy Packages. The following packages were added to the
Debian archive recently.

 * [16]arch -- Revision control system.
 * [17]chicken -- Simple Scheme-to-C compiler.
 * [18]createdisk -- Plex86 Empty Disk Image Utility.
 * [19]dnstracer -- Trace DNS queries to the source.
 * [20]mailscanner -- Email virus scanner and spam tagger.
 * [21]metacity -- Lightweight GTK2 based Window Manager.
 * [22]prestimel -- Tool to create presentations from a XML-file.
 * [23]race -- 3D arcade overhead car game.
 * [24]rdiff -- Binary diff tool for signature-based differences.
 * [25]scribe -- Document Production System.
 * [26]signing-party -- Scripts and docs useful for keysigning
   parties.
 * [27]wayv -- Experimental hand writing/gesture recognition program.

 16. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/devel/arch.html
 17. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/interpreters/chicken.html
 18. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/misc/createdisk.html
 19. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/net/dnstracer.html
 20. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/mail/mailscanner.html
 21. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/x11/metacity.html
 22. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/text/prestimel.html
 23. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/games/race.html
 24. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/utils/rdiff.html
 25. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/devel/scribe.html
 26. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/misc/signing-party.html
 27. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/x11/wayv.html

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

 * [28]UCD SNMP -- Remote exploit.
 * [29]Hanterm -- Buffer overflow.
 * [30]ncurses -- Buffer overflow.

 28. http://www.debian.org/security/2002/dsa-111
 29. http://www.debian.org/security/2002/dsa-112
 30. http://www.debian.org/security/2002/dsa-113

Orphaned Packages. 3 packages were orphaned this week and require a
new maintainer. This makes a total of 108 orphaned packages. Many
thanks to the previous maintainer who contributed to the Free Software
community. Please see the [31]WNPP pages for the full list, and please
add a note to the bug report and retitle it to ITA: if you plan to
take over a package.

 31. http://www.debian.org/devel/wnpp/

 * [32]epic4-script-splitfire -- A good script for new epic4 users.
   ([33]Bug#134577)
 * [34]logtrend-complexalarm -- Logtrend module for trend analysis.
   ([35]Bug#134842)
 * [36]tulip -- A system dedicated to the visualization of huge
   graphs. ([37]Bug#134008)

 32. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/net/epic4-script-splitfire.html
 33. http://bugs.debian.org/134577
 34. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/net/logtrend-complexalarm.html
 35. http://bugs.debian.org/134842
 36. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/graphics/tulip.html
 37. http://bugs.debian.org/134008

Got News? Please inform us about everything that's going on in the
Debian community. We are always looking for any interesting stories to
add, especially new items by voluntary writers. We're looking forward
to your mail, send it to [38]dwn@debian.org.

 38. mailto:dwn@debian.org


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