Debian Weekly News - April 12th, 1999

Welcome to Debian Weekly News, a newsletter for the Debian developer community.

Adam Di Carlo posted a list of items that need to be fixed in Slink. This includes moving in the source to kernel 2.2.5, and makedev and lsof fixes. A consensus was quickly reached that these fixes need to go into a point release of Slink.

Several proposals of different kinds were made this week:

A thread popped up on debian-user featuring the authors of pine talking about the copyright of pine. It's worth reading to understand why the authors of pine have given it the copyright they have, which keeps it in non-free and allows it to be distributed only as source.

There was a bit of discussion about knfs, the kernel nfs server, and about how to let it be used when a 2.2.x kernel is in use while still allowing the old user space nfs server to be used with 2.0.x kernels, and allowing people who prefer the user space server to continue to use it.

Following a thread about how long it takes for the new-maintainer team to process an application, James Troup sent a mail that gives a good feel for the current situation. "Processing can take under 10 minutes or it can take > 1.5 years+." Hopefully no one in the queue will have to wait that long...

Gtk and glib 1.1 are about to be removed from the archive, to be replaced with gtk and glib 1.2. This affects a fair number of packages that are still linked to the old library. If your package is affected, you have already gotten a bug report, but it's worth repeating here that all such packages should be recompiled with gtk 1.2.

A debian-perl mailing list has been created. It will be used for discussion among perl module maintainers, and for the transition to perl 5.005.

Some discussion took place regarding the splitting up of fvwm-common into separate packages, or at least renaming it. The package has nothing fvwm-specific in it anymore.

A few packages changed hands this week. Among them were the mysql packages, which were passed back and forth several times before finally ending up in the lap of Christian Hammers. And Martin Schulze unleashed upon the developers list a large list of packages he is giving away for adoption.

Security news:

Server news:

New packages added to Debian this week include:

Followups to last week's news:

Thanks to our contributors, Pablo Averbuj, Randolph Chung, and Branden Robinson.


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This issue of Debian Weekly News was edited by Joey Hess.