Debian Weekly News - 1999-10-26

Welcome to Debian Weekly News, a newsletter for the Debian developer community. With the freeze date quickly approaching, things are heating up this week.

On the 30th a BugSquash party will be held, in which as many developers as possible will work on fixing many release critical bugs. Coordination will be via IRC. Previous BugSquash parties have been successful at fixing lots of bugs; if you have free time this weekend your participation is encouraged.

The size of Debian continues to be a concern this week. Potato is too big to fit on two CD's of binary packages, and almost everyone feels Debian is becoming unwieldy. The 47MB package mentioned last week was removed from the archive at the request of its maintainer, and other removals are being considered.

Work on the boot floppies continues on many fronts, including hardware autodetection, work on busybox, and discussions of how to make them use an initrd.

The dpkg bug list is now smaller and more organized. Dpkg has less than 200 bugs now. This amazing feat (dpkg used to have 500+ bugs) is the result of lots of work on dpkg, as well as a new section in the BTS for upstream dpkg bugs.

A belated security note: A fixed apmd package was released into stable last week. It closes a buffer overflow security hole.

If you represent Debian in any way Wichert wants to hear from you. He's compiling a list of people who represent Debian in LPI, LSB, etc, to make it public on the web.

Lalo Martins made a proposal to make Debian use package pools starting as soon as potato is frozen. He intends to call for a vote in two weeks. Package pools have been frequently discussed in the past, but no action has ever been taken to implement them; perhaps this will start the ball rolling, though it might be difficult to implement everything in time. Anthony Towns posted a counterproposal that has many of the nice features of package pools without requiring any major changes to the archive.

As usual, Debian-JP news is available.

New packages in Debian this week include the following, and 59 more:

Debian at ALS through the eyes of Branden Robinson filters out some of the best webcam pictures from ALS with amusing commentary. If that's not enough, here are even more pictures.

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.