Debian Weekly News - November 17th, 1999

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

Wichert Akkerman posted the Debian Machine Usage Policy, a comprehensive description of what is and is not acceptable use of Debian project machines by developers. It was greeted with mixed feelings; some people feel this is an unnecessary document, and expect people to just do the right thing. Others think the project has gotten too big to not have a usage policy of this sort in place, and point out that it has in fact been violated in the past.

Another bugsquash party will be held this weekend. Participate on Saturday and help us "splatter bug juice all over the dist!"

Three security fixes were released this week: A new version of BIND has been released that fixes a remote root exploit. The security fixes were also backported to stable. Also, a new version of proftpd for stable has been released, fixing a number of security holes. And finally, a fix for a nfs-server buffer overflow has been released for stable.

Vincent Renardias has made available a Y2K update for Slink, with fixes for every known Y2K problem in Slink except a small Y2K problem in nethack (which still has no known fix).

Corel Linux has been released. A few developers have looked at it and given some initial opinions which range from "the feeling I get is not of a new operating system, but of a stripped-down Debian with KDE, and some more flashy graphics" to "it will make a great desktop to keep users happy and debian under the bonet to keep us admins happy". The important point is that it is a Debian system with few modified packages, and apt-get and dpkg continue to work.

A new "science" section has been added to the ftp site alongside the existing sections like mail and games. Anyone who maintains packages that belong in the new section should contact James Troup.

The Bug Tracking System has passed the 50,000 bug mark. A bit more than 8 thousand of those bugs remain open, so Debian has fixed over 41 thousand bugs. Good work, everyone.

Some Debian merchandise is available at Copyleft. No shirts yet, but they have nice black and white frisbees with the Debian logo on them.

A ton of new packages were added to Debian this week, with the new larger archive maintenance team working hard to get new packages into Debian in record time.


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