Debian Weekly News - April 19th, 2000

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

The testing of the new maintainer process is in full swing! For the first time in nearly a year, new blood is entering the Debian project. The lucky first person through the new new-maintainer process is Brendan O'Dea. Brendan and others who are finishing up their applications went through the process in a trial run to work any bugs out of the new system, which is not yet open to all comers. Those persons who had pending applications when new maintainer closed are due to be processed next, and the process will open to the public as soon as a web page interface is complete.

Richard Braakman would like to start the first test cycle in 2 weeks, on May 2nd. "After a fixed-length testing period we will evaluate the results and decide whether or not to release what we have." If we did release after only one test cycle, that would mean releasing in about one month. On the other hand, multiple test cycles may be required..

Wichert Akkerman posted a list of changes to dpkg that are planned for woody. Some of these changes, including using objdump instead of ldd and doing file reordering when a package is built, are already in CVS; while others, like integrating suidmanager and debconf and supporting signed packages, are just planned to be implemented in time for woody's release. Many of the listed items are things that have long been missing from dpkg; it's great to see work progressing on Debian's fundamental program.

Wichert also posted about the sad state of documentation registration in Debian. We have multiple competing systems for registering documentation, and so there is no central registry that lists all documentation. Wichert proposed a new system that is similar to doc-base but borrows ideas from the menu package. Adam Di Carlo pointed out that he has similar changes planned for the next release of doc-base.

Other discussions this week included installing Debian from floppies and fixing package priorities.

New packages in Debian this week include the following and 29 more:

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