Debian Weekly News - September 28th, 1999

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

The Developer Database is now on-line. With the web and mail interfaces to the database, developers can enter various information about themselves, including contact information, vacation status, latitude and longitude, and passwords for some of the project's machines. The best thing to come out of it so far is the developer map, which shows just how global a project Debian is. Developers are encouraged to add their coordinates to the database.

People who want to download CD images are now walked through a very clever question and answer process at cdimage.debian.org, designed to weed out those who don't really need a CD image from those who do, and let people in the former group know about better alternatives. The really clever bit is the new method for downloading Debian CD's. In the past, cdimage.debian.org and its mirrors were frequently overloaded as people downloaded huge files from them. The new method allows any normal Debian mirror be used as a CD image mirror -- without containing CD images! If that piques your curiosity, read all about it here.

The boot floppies team is in need of a leader. Enrique Zanardi has stepped down from leading the boot floppies effort due to time constraints. The good news is that with some recent fixes, the unstable boot floppies finally build and work on i386 platforms again. It will probably take another floppy to install the next release of Debian; the rescue floppy has been split in two to allow today's larger kernels and libc to fit on it.

Should it be possible to install more than one daemon of the same type at the same time? Currently it's not; the packages conflict because they need to bind to the same port. While it's rare to need two pop daemons or two web servers on the same system, it's not unheard of, and some people want to be able to do it with Debian. Others go a step further and would prefer daemons do not start automatically when installed. Both of these desires would lead to additional prompting at install time, at best, although debconf could alleviate this. No consensus has been reached on this issue.

As usual a summary of news from the Debian JP project is available.

New packages in Debian this week include the following 8 plus 8 more:

Followups:

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


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