Debian Weekly News - July 1st, 2001

We've just entered phase one of Woody's freeze process. Although Release Manager Anthony Towns started off the announcement with "welcome to the woody freeze", woody is not yet frozen in the traditional sense of the word. Not quite yet. What we do have is a deadline -- July 24th -- for phase one of the freeze process to complete. This first phase involves deciding what we want to release, by freezing Debian policy, deciding what architectures will be in shape to release, deciding if this release will include crypto in main, and getting the base system in shape for the freeze. If these deadlines are met by the 24th, the next stage will be freezing the base system. By the way, it's official -- woody will be Debian 3.0. Quoth AJ: "This is, to put it mildly, a somewhat controversial decision, but it's one I get to make."

Debian BSD? The Debian-BSD list has picked up a little steam lately. The Debian-BSD list has been alive since May of 1999, but "never gets far past the chat stage," to quote Gary Kline. Andreas Krennmair posted a list of necessary packages, and there seems to be some intense interest from several people.

GCC 3.0 Status. Interested in using GCC 3.0? There's an instructive discussion on the debian-devel mailing list started by Eray Ozkural about the status of the GCC 3.0 packages in testing. A note for newbies, GCC is the GNU Compiler Collection. At one time it stood for GNU C Compiler, but GCC now supports a number of languages in addition to C. Some architectures, such as the IA-64 processor architecture, have been using GCC 3.0 from the get-go. The Debian releases for the x86 and other processors will have to be migrated to GCC 3.0, which will be quite an undertaking.

Is that a Python in your pocket? We're sure many Debian developers were glad to see the Python 2.0.1 GPL-compatible release. Gregor Hoffleit has brought the transition topic up on the debian-devel list for discussion.

Debian Events. There are four, count 'em, four events that the Debian Project will be represented at in the upcoming week. The Debian Project will have a presence at exhibitions and conferences in France, Germany, Mexico and the United Kingdom. You can find out more about these events, and future events, on the Debian Events page: https://www.debian.org/events/2001/.

Security. Just one security issue to report this week. Michal Zalewski discovered a problem with Samba, namely that Samba does not properly validate names from remote machines using NetBIOS. Any Samba users will want to upgrade ASAP.

As always write us with your Debian-related news at dwn@debian.org. Let us know if your project is doing something exciting, or if there's been interesting news on your mailing list. Have a great week!


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This issue of Debian Weekly News was edited by Joe 'Zonker' Brockmeier, Jean-Christophe Helary and Tollef Fog Heen.