Debian Weekly News - September 7th, 1999

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

The technical committee has spoken: /usr/doc/<package> will be provided as a symlink in FHS compliant packages. This started an avalanche of updated, FHS compliant packages. For implementation details, see this message (debhelper will handle most of this automatically).

The latest release of bind contains crypto code that is not DFSG free. Thus the DNS server, a major component of Debian, or of any unix system, has become non-free -- a very bad situation. It looks like removing this code or maintaining the older, free version of bind would be very hard. One alternative that is being looked at is using the new dents DNS server. Perhaps the biggest problem with dents is that "it's not BIND" -- and so is not as trusted as the classic DNS server.

Freeze watch: The freeze is just 7 weeks away, if we stick to the planned schedule. Chris Lawrence posted a nice list of things we need to get done for release, and how close we are to accomplishing them.

With GPG 1.0 released, many people will probably be switching to GPG soon. Luckily, it turns out to have been possible for some time to sign packages with GPG and upload them into Debian, though few people have done this yet.

What do Debian developers do when they're not working on Debian? A lot of them write software for linux in general, or are the upstream maintainers of existing software. Martin Schulze had the idea that a list of such work would be nice to have, and 123 such packages were soon found, including such important software as ld.so, strace, sysklogd, sysvinit, watchdog, and wvdial.

A bit of confusion has emerged recently about the purpose of security.debian.org. It was originally intended to be a way for the security team to quickly get updated packages out without waiting for the mirrors. But now people want to mirror it! There's also some disagreement about how long packages should remain on security.debian.org after they are merged into the distribution proper.

As usual, this week's Debian-JP news is available.

Thanks to Randolph Chung and Katsura S. Yoshio for contributing.


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