Debian Weekly News - February 23rd, 2000

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

Over 100 packages are in danger of being removed from Debian. Richard Braakman posted a list of packages that are headed for the Release Critical Bug Horizon and are due to be removed less than a week from now if their bugs remain unfixed. Threatened package include apache, fetchmail, gpm, and samba. Already this has led to a significant decrease in the size of the Release Critical bug list as people work to get bugs fixed on time. Perhaps the best example of this work is this project to fix all of openssh's bugs. However, the 28th still bodes to be a very interesting and eventful day.

Elections for the next Debian Project Leader have opened, and will close in two weeks. Developers can grab a ballot and vote. Linux.com is posting interviews with the candidates, starting with an interview of Ben Collins.

Dale Scheetz posted a summary of what the New Maintainer team is doing: work is progressing on the web site, backend database, and Applicant's FAQ. The team is mostly done with writing an Applicant's Checklist. Soon, they plan to "run a "test case" through the process to shake out any issues", and then begin on the backlog of people who have waited so long for new-maintainer to reopen. This should all happen within the next few weeks.

Will Debian Alpha be fit for release with the rest of potato? David Huggins-Daines raised a number of concerns -- many packages cannot be built on alpha right now, C++ programs have major problems, Debian Alpha is not binary-compatible with Red Hat, and "in short, our system is in a mess due to circumstances entirely beyond our control". David proposed that we revert to an older version of egcs for Alpha, as it seems gcc is at the root of all these problems.

New packages in Debian this week including the following at 60 more:

(Thanks, Randolph.)


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