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Debian Weekly News
http://www.debian.org/News/weekly/current/issue/
Debian Weekly News - February 1st, 2000
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Welcome to Debian Weekly News, a newsletter for the Debian developer
community. This is a combined two week edition.
Project Leader elections start soon. Nominations for Project Leader
were open for [8]quite a while before anyone dared to volunteer for
the job, but 4 candidates eventually stepped forward: [9]Ben Collins,
[10]Joel Klecker, [11]Matthew Vernon, and current DPL [12]Wichert
Akkerman. The candidates will probably [13]debate on IRC sometime next
week.
We will soon enter the first test cycle for potato. In preparation for
that, Richard Braakman [14]removed 42 packages from potato that have
release critical bugs and are not terribly important to Debian as a
whole. Richard also [15]listed the 5 packages the "most likely to
delay the release" -- packages that have release critical bugs but
cannot just be removed. Unsurprisingly, these actions prompted a good
deal of work, and some griping about the packages that were removed.
A new version of the boot floppies has been [16]released. New features
include DHCP support, network installs via the HTTP protocol, a
"compact" kernel flavor that requires fewer disks to install, and a
new simplified package selection that uses task packages and avoids
dselect entirely. This release of boot floppies was done "specifically
to enable a release/test cycle", so if you're able, test it and send
in bug reports.
According to [17]The Register, Transmeta's "Mobile Linux" is based on
the Debian distribution. Mobile Linux is shipped with Transmeta's
TM3120 chip. Transmeta has not yet confirmed this.
Believe it or not, another KDE licensing discussion has erupted on
debian-devel. It started with a simple question: Why is KDE not in
Debian? Haven't the license issues been dealt with by the new Open
Source Qt, and other changes? Well according to Joseph Carter, there
are [18]still problems. KDE is mostly licensed under the GPL, which is
still not compatible with the QPL, unless the author gives explicit
permission for his GPL'd code to be linked with Qt. For large parts of
KDE, of course, that should be no problem -- people affiliated with
the KDE project wrote it and should be able to give this permission.
But, there are still parts of KDE [19]such as kghostview which are
copyright by others. In any case, such permission has never been
given, and so Debian continues to be unable to distribute KDE. Raul
Miller [20]summed it up: "If the KDE folks would make a reasonably
solid statement of permission, we could probably distribute most of
KDE. In the mean time, we wait."
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References
8. http://www.debian.org/Lists-Archives/debian-devel-announce-0001/msg00016.html
9. http://www.debian.org/Lists-Archives/debian-vote-0001/msg00000.html
10. http://www.debian.org/Lists-Archives/debian-vote-0001/msg00002.html
11. http://www.debian.org/Lists-Archives/debian-vote-0001/msg00008.html
12. http://www.debian.org/Lists-Archives/debian-vote-0001/msg00001.html
13. http://www.debian.org/Lists-Archives/debian-vote-0001/msg00012.html
14. http://www.debian.org/Lists-Archives/debian-devel-announce-0001/msg00022.html
15. http://www.debian.org/Lists-Archives/debian-devel-announce-0001/msg00023.html
16. http://www.debian.org/Lists-Archives/debian-release-0001/msg00078.html
17. http://www.theregister.co.uk/000120-000004.html
18. http://www.debian.org/Lists-Archives/debian-devel-0001/msg01074.html
19. http://www.debian.org/Lists-Archives/debian-devel-0001/msg01113.html
20. http://www.debian.org/Lists-Archives/debian-legal-0001/msg00095.html
--
see shy jo