Debian Weekly News - May 17th, 1999

Welcome to the 20th issue of Debian Weekly News, a newsletter for the Debian developer community.

It seems that Apple is planning to use dpkg as the package manager for Darwin. "The Debian packaging system has been adopted for the Darwin distribution, and should be fairly easily moved to Mac OS X Server if someone were inclined to try." In fact, you can download dpkg from this page at Apple though oddly you have to get an account to download it.

There was another long discussion about how to switch to perl 5.005. There's still a fair amount of confusion about how to accomplish this cleanly, though the maintainer thinks he has a viable solution according to this message.

A Debian Users Group has been formed in Philadelphia. This seems to be a growing trend.. Also, another chance to meet fellow Debianites is coming up at Linux Expo; several developers will be there.

Stefan Gybas posted a long message about the status of Linuxconf and Debian. It's further along than one might think, and should be moving out of experimental and into unstable soon. A lot of work remains to be done to tie various parts of it into Debian.

The Debian JP project is working on an i18n framework that would let the Description field of packages be translated. Details are available here (in Japanese).

Here's a ZDNet article on Corel and Debian. It wavers between the vaguely positive -- "For some users, in fact, Corel could be the corporate face that Debian has always lacked.", and the disturbing -- "Corel's choice will certainly give Debian a bigger audience by dispensing with some of Debian's political agenda.". What political agenda? This was followed up by another article, which theorizes that the "GNU" in the name of Debian may be scaring off users. Again he accuses Debian of being political: "those in our world who believe in manipulating language for political means insist on the term GNU/Linux".

Some quick notes about other architectures: New sparc bootdisks are available for testing thanks to Eric Delaunay. Martin Lucina has written a new TGA framebuffer driver for Alphas.

Help wanted:

Server news:

Thanks to Katsura S. Yoshio and Christian Meder for contributing.


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