Debian Weekly News - January 12th, 2000

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

The freeze is just a few days off, and things appear to be going according to plan so far. Tradition says we are due for a drive crash in one of our servers, but that hasn't happened yet. And in a welcome change of pace, a new version of X was released just in time to be slid into unstable before the freeze, rather than just too late. Lots of freeze related activity is going on, from a Grand Bug Bash Festival this weekend that caused another dip in the release critical bug graph, to a slew of new upstream versions of packages being uploaded just in time for the freeze. Work continues on the boot floppies. Traffic on the mailing lists has been as heavy as usual, but without many long threads for DWN to report on. The overall impression is one of lots of people hard at work.

One final minor release of Debian 2.1 may happen, to take care of the remaining y2k problems, and a few more security holes. Speaking of security holes, three new security fixes are out, one for nvi that fixes a hole that allowed removal of files in the root directory, another for a remote exploit of lpr, and another for mysql that allowed the test user to change root's password. The new X mentioned above also fixes a security hole in imake.

A positive and very clueful review of Debian appeared in LinuxPlanet. "Debian's sophisticated package management greatly simplifies software installations and upgrades and contributes greatly to stability and reliability of the system. Of course, it's not entirely foolproof".

New packages in Debian this week include the following and 121 more:

Most of these packages were uploaded before January 5th and not processed until now. There is still a moratorium on uploads of entirely new packages.

Thanks to Randolph Chung for contributing.


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