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From:	 Martin Schulze <joey@infodrom.org>
To:	 Debian News Channel <debian-news@lists.debian.org>
Subject: Debian Weekly News - March 6th, 2002
Date:	 Wed, 6 Mar 2002 20:50:36 +0100

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Debian Weekly News
http://www.debian.org/News/weekly/2002/10/
Debian Weekly News - March 6th, 2002
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Welcome to this year's tenth issue of DWN, the weekly newsletter for
the Debian community. We're very excited to report about the most
weird way to create GUI applications: using PHP. See below. Our Danish
readers may be interested in this [1]Debian guide, which is a much
more in-depth supplement to the official installation manual.

 1. http://debianguiden.dk/

DebConf 2 in Toronto. Finally, Joe Drew [2]announced that the second
Debian Conference will take place from Friday, July 5, to Sunday, July
7 in Toronto, Ontario in Canada. That's the weekend after the
[3]Ottawa Linux Symposium so people can attend both events. People
who wish to give a presentation or a talk should contact [4]Joe Drew
as soon as possible.

 2. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce-0203/msg00001.html
 3. http://www.linuxsymposium.org/
 4. mailto:hoserhead@woot.net

Campaigning Period for Leader Election. Manoj Srivastava, with the
Project Secretary Honorary Hat on, [5]reported the end of the
nomination period, with three candidates standing forth to be counted:
[6]Bdale Garbee, [7]Raphaël Hertzog and [8]Branden Robinson. The
platforms from these candidates are online now. The three week
campaign period is now kicking off. Watch the [9]debian-vote list.
Many questions and statemens from the candidates are posted there.
Noteworthy is the following [10]list of questions to the candidates by
Anthony Towns that, as a side effect, demonstrates the limits of being
a Debian Project Leader.

 5. http://lists.debian.org/debian-vote-0202/msg00038.html
 6. http://www.debian.org/vote/2002/platforms/bdale
 7. http://www.debian.org/vote/2002/platforms/raphael
 8. http://www.debian.org/vote/2002/platforms/branden
 9. http://lists.debian.org/debian-vote/
 10. http://lists.debian.org/debian-vote-0203/msg00087.html

Writing GUI Applications with PHP. Too often [11]PHP is thought of as
only an HTML-embedded web scripting language. However, it is also a
full-featured general purpose language that can be used for much more.
One of the goals behind the [12]PHP-GTK project was to prove that PHP
can be used to write client-side GUI applications. This project
doesn't allow you to create web applications with GTK but standalone
GUI applications and start them with php4 -q hello.php as if you were
using Perl/Gtk, Python/Gtk or similar.

 11. http://www.php.net/
 12. http://gtk.php.net/

Woody Release Status. Anthony Towns released another [13]status report
about the Woody release. The release critical (RC) bug list is down to
200 and another set of packages was removed from Woody. For people who
want to help with RC bugs, there are two different RC bug lists: the
[14]traditional one and the [15]one that gives an indication of how
buggy the versions of the packages in testing are. People interested
in making sure packages they're interested in don't get thrown out are
encouraged to peruse both lists if they have spare time.

 13. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce-0203/msg00002.html
 14. http://bugs.debian.org/~wakkerma/bugs/
 15. http://ftp-master.debian.org/testing/testing_probs.html

GNU/Linux Web Browser Review. Recently, Rob Valliere [16]reviewed web
browsers available on GNU/Linux distributions including Debian
GNU/Linux. A lot of significant development effort has been made to
[17]Galeon, [18]Mozilla and [19]Konqueror for the past few months. The
browsers that impressed him most are Galeon 1.0.3, Mozilla 0.9.8 and
Opera 6.0 TP3 (which is not available in Debian GNU/Linux since it is
non-free).

 16. http://www.robval.com/linux/2002/browsers.html
 17. http://www.mozilla.org/projects/embedding/examples/galeon.html
 18. http://www.mozilla.org/
 19. http://www.konqueror.org/

Gnome-Print Caused Trouble in Sid. Gnome packages didn't work as well
as they should recently, due to problems with Gnome core packages.
Because of a [20]dependency issue affecting libgnomeprint* packages,
most of the core Gnome packages were removed. It seems that there were
circular dependencies on gnome-print, which was resolved later.

 20. http://debianplanet.org/article.php?sid=611

Woody Release Notes. Robert Bradford is [21]working on new [22]release
notes for the Woody release. He gathers help from people for details
with regard to porting Debian to non-ia32 platforms, split and renamed
packages and general problems and fixes. As an example, [23]here are
release notes about XFree86 for Woody. If you can help Robert, please
drop him a line at [24]rob@debianplanet.org.

 21. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-0203/msg00104.html
 22. http://www.debian.org/releases/woody/i386/release-notes/
 23. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-0203/msg00113.html
 24. mailto:rob@debianplanet.org

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

 * [25]alicq -- Flexible ICQ client in pure Tcl/Tk.
 * [26]php-gtk -- PHP extension for GTK+ client-side cross-platform
   GUI apps.
 * [27]pgi -- Progeny graphical installer creation system.

 25. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/net/alicq.html
 26. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/devel/php-gtk.html
 27. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/admin/pgi.html

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

 * [28]PHP -- Broken boundary check and more.
 * [29]CFS -- Buffer overflow.
 * [30]CVS -- Improper variable initialization.
 * [31]xsane -- Insecure temporary files.

 28. http://www.debian.org/security/2002/dsa-115
 29. http://www.debian.org/security/2002/dsa-116
 30. http://www.debian.org/security/2002/dsa-117
 31. http://www.debian.org/security/2002/dsa-118

Orphaned Packages. 4 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 [32]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.

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

 * [33]hanterm-classic -- Another X terminal emulator with Hangul
   support. ([34]Bug#136706)
 * [35]ines -- Emulator for the NES/Famicom/Dandy game system.
   ([36]Bug#136813)
 * [37]mueller -- English/Russian dictionary in dict format.
   ([38]Bug#136812)
 * [39]php4-pgsql -- PostgreSQL module for php4. ([40]Bug#135690)

 33. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/x11/hanterm-classic.html
 34. http://bugs.debian.org/136706
 35. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/games/ines.html
 36. http://bugs.debian.org/136813
 37. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/text/mueller7-dict.html
 38. http://bugs.debian.org/136812
 39. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/web/php4-pgsql.html
 40. http://bugs.debian.org/135690

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 volunteer writers. We're looking forward
to receiving your mail at [41]dwn@debian.org.

 41. mailto:dwn@debian.org


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