Debian Weekly News - May 3rd, 2000

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

Debian has entered the first Test Cycle. Richard Braakman first removed 17 packages with release critical bugs from the distribution, which has reduced the number of release critical bugs to less than 100. The only changes that will occur in potato in next 2 weeks are a final boot-floppies update and CD image creation. Potato should be ready for testing in a few days, once these final pieces have settled. At that point, any interested users are encouraged to upgrade, and help test the distribution.

Wichert Akkerman posted a rough proposal for a new source package format. Some discussion ensued and it became clear that we don't yet have a consensus about everything a new source format should do, or how it should work.

Other discussion topics this week include a long thread about what to do after potato is released and about release management and timelines in general, a thread about phasing out override files, and discussion about Microsoft's patent on "installing and updating program module components" over the net, which we must hope doesn't really cover anything Debian has been doing for the past 4 years.

New packages in Debian unstable this week include the following and 45 more:


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