Debian Weekly News - May 8th, 2002

Welcome to this year's nineteenth issue of DWN, the weekly newsletter for the Debian community.

Hardware Detection Libraries. People keep thinking that Debian does not come with any sort of hardware detection. This is wrong, as Petter Reinholdtsen demonstrated, when he wondered why Debian has so many hardware detection packages. Jeff Licquia and Noèl Köthe replied and explained the virtue and history of each.

Open Standards: Principles and Practice. One of the problems Bruce Perens is facing when he is representing SPI and Debian in various standards organisations is that every one of them has a different definition of an Open Standard. Almost all standards organizations allow the incorporation of software patents, discriminatory licensing, or other features that seriously damage the "open-ness" of the standard. Thus, Bruce is presenting to you the first draft of Open Standards: Principles and Practice with a link for the discussion list.

New European Debian Machine. Wichert Akkerman announced a new machine to host certain parts of Debian in Europe. As pandora has been suffering from a lack of diskspace and intermittent networking problems for a while now, it will be replaced by satie, which is a VA2240 donated by VA Linux Systems and hosted by the Student Net Twente of the University of Twente. Pandora has hosted QA, NM, non-US and security.debian.org.

New Debian Developer's Reference Structure. Adam Di Carlo announced his first draft of a thorough re-organization of the New Debian Developer's Reference which is available here. His intent of the re-organization is to collect the duties, resources, packaging hints, and other things to do beyond packaging in their own chapters.

Debian Preinstalled on HP Blade Server. This will be of interest mostly for those of you who use Debian in a professional environment. Hewlett-Packard announced that their HP Blade Server bh7800 are delivered with Debian GNU/Linux (2.2r3) preinstalled. The HP Blade Server bh7800 contains multiple server blades. Each server blade is a single-board computer, running a separate operating system.

Subproject Howto. Ben Armstrong started writing a subproject-howto in debiandoc sgml. Based on the experiences starting and sustaining a development subproject within Debian, Ben Armstrong explains how to start a subproject within Debian, and why they are important to the vitality and quality of Debian.

Debiandoc-SGML Version 2. Osamu Aoki (青木 修) started to discuss improvements for the next generation document generation. Since Woody is practically frozen and debiandoc-sgml is in a very complete shape for the release, it seems to be time to collect a list of requested improvements. He already supplied an initial list of items he would like to have changed.

New or Noteworthy Packages. The following packages were added to the Debian archive recently or contain important updates.

Orphaned Packages. 1 package was orphaned this week and requires a new maintainer. This makes a total of 83 orphaned packages. Many thanks to the previous maintainers who contributed to the Free Software community. Please see the WNPP pages for the full list, and please add a note to the bug report and retitle it to ITA: if you plan to take over a package.

Seen something interesting? Please drop us a note whenever you see something noteworthy that you think is appropriate for inclusion in DWN. We don't see everything, unfortunately, and this month will be a busy one for us. Of course, we are also thankful for completely written items from volunteer writers. We're looking forward to receiving your mail at dwn@debian.org.


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This issue of Debian Weekly News was edited by Yooseong Yang and Martin 'Joey' Schulze.