Debian Weekly News - July 11th, 2000
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Debian Weekly News
http://www.debian.org/News/weekly/current/issue/
Debian Weekly News - July 11th, 2000
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Welcome to Debian Weekly News, a newsletter for the Debian developer
community. This is a combined two week edition.
The Zeroth Debian Conference took place last week in Bourdeaux,
France. During the Conference many [1]topics were presented, including
two introductory talks on the Hurd, given by Neal Walfield and Richard
M. Stallman; an overview of Debian [2]past and present, as well as
some brief discussion about a new package format, given by Wichert
Akkerman; [3]PingOO, a project to provide schools with communication
servers administered remotely by a distributed team, and [4]Telemetry
Software (management and diagnostics of networks and servers) provided
by [5]SiteRock, both of them based on Debian GNU/Linux. Major
discussions took place around the topics of Debian's internal
organization and the new maintainer process. For more information, see
[6]this summary by Marcelo Magallon. [7]Plans are already underway
for the First Debian Conference next July.
Anthony Towns [8]posted an update on the status of test cycle 3,
which begins Real Soon Now. "The purpose of the third test cycle is
simply to ensure that we're ready to release: we believe the previous
two cycles have shaken out most of the bugs in the install procedure,
so we don't expect major problems." Randolph Chung said in an
[9]install report of the latest boot-floppies build that
boot-floppies "2.2.16 for i386 is definitely ready for upload, and
probably ready for potato release." Things have been slightly delayed
though, with so many Debian people at the Zeroth Debian Conference.
Saying goodbye to libc5. Ben Collins [10]proposed that all the libc5
support packages be removed from unstable, since it has been years
since Debian was a libc5 distribution and keeping libc5 support has
led to a "lot of very old cruft and hacks". Ben asked if anyone had
"compelling reasons to continue to have it around", and so far no one
has thought of any.
Paul J Thompson thinks that Debian is reaching "critical mass" of
public recognition. He cites the increasing number of
[11]distributions based on Debian, the many people and projects that
are beginning to release debian packages and support Debian, etc. With
growth comes problems, and Paul identifies two key problems that are
nothing new: the unmanageable number of packages, and release schedule
difficulties. He goes on make a "radical" suggestion to address the
problems -- split up Debian into several sections like core, rapid
development, and so on, that have different release schedules. It's an
[12]interesting message, well worth reading even if you [13]disagree
with his ideas.
More news tidbits:
* Chuan-kai Lin has [14]set up a [15]web page devoted to tracking
key signing requests.
* Fumitoshi UKAI is working on [16]auto-apt, a tool that tracks the
files you try to use and automatically installs them on the fly.
* Slashdot is [17]interviewing Ian Murdock, Debian's founder.
And finally, here is [18]an article by one reporter who really
understands Debian (and reads debian-devel). "Debian stands out as the
primary Linux distribution that is a community, as opposed to other
distributions that simply have communities. [...] Debian's
committee-type workings are occasionally cantankerous and political,
and it has never been quick to react or to release. But the quality of
its work is unquestioned, as is the group's commitment to software
freedom."
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References
1. http://lsm.abul.org/program/topic18_en.html
2. http://www.wi.leidenuniv.nl/~wichert/talks/
3. http://www.pingoo.org/
4. http://www.openrock.net/
5. http://www.siterock.com/
6. http://www.debian.org/Lists-Archives/debian-news-00/msg00023.html
7. http://www.debian.org/News/weekly/current/issue/mail#2
8. http://www.debian.org/Lists-Archives/debian-devel-announce-0007/msg00000.html
9. http://www.debian.org/Lists-Archives/debian-testing-0007/msg00006.html
10. http://www.debian.org/News/weekly/current/issue/mail#1
11. http://www.debian.org/related_links#basedon
12. http://www.debian.org/Lists-Archives/debian-devel-0006/msg02181.html
13. http://www.debian.org/Lists-Archives/debian-devel-0006/msg02209.html
14. http://www.debian.org/Lists-Archives/debian-devel-0007/msg00327.html
15. http://oink.cc.ntu.edu.tw/~cklin/signing/index.html
16. http://www.debian.org/Lists-Archives/debian-devel-0007/msg00341.html
17. http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=00/07/10/1256216&mode=nested
18. http://www.zdnet.com/enterprise/stories/main/0%2c10228%2c2598156%2c00.html
--
see shy jo
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