Debian Weekly News - May 3rd, 1999

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

The results are in for the vote on number of logos and licenses. There will be two logos with different licenses. Voting on the actual logo is about to begin.

The long awaited new version of X has finally been uploaded to unstable. Some major changes have been made to the source packaging, and of course it's a new upstream version of X as well. Also, the contents of the GNOME staging area are ready for broader use and testing and have been copied to Incoming.

Should clients that can communicate only with non-free servers be placed in contrib? James Troup raised this very contentious issue when he posted about his reason for rejecting the ICQ client TiK from Incoming. One major objection is that this would imply that a program that parses freshmeat or the dejanews web pages must go in contrib because the code that generates those web sites is not published. If we decide to follow James's reasoning, a great deal of software will be moved to contrib.

Joey Hess has proposed large modifications of debhelper for version 2.0. These modifications will require an environment variable to be set to enable them, so backwards compatibility is not broken by default. The aim of the modifications is to make debhelper's interface cleaner and easier to learn. After some discussion the changes to make are nearly agreed on. Debhelper has some new competition: Yet Another Debianization Aid (YADA) was announced this week. It centralizes all information needed to build a package into a single file, similar to an RPM spec file.

A few problems with Debian Alpha: Attempting to upgrade a Debian Alpha machine to glibc 2.1 is likely to break the system unless apt is used for the upgrade. And egcs is producing invalid code when optimizing with -O2.

News from Debian Sparc is brighter: Upgrading to glibc 2.1 is no problem now if you have a 2.2.x kernel, and new sparc bootdisks will be ready soon.

Attention Finns: On May 15th there will be a Debian meeting in Finland.

Joey Hess has started posting weekly summaries of proposals on the debian-policy list. The first summary is here.

New packages added to Debian this week include the following and 13 other packages:

Correction:

Thanks to Randolph Chung and Christian Meder for contributing.


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