Debian Weekly News - February 13th, 2002

Welcome to this year's seventh issue of DWN, the weekly newsletter to the Debian community. Last week was not as eventful as previous weeks so this is a relatively short issue.

Debian Leader Election. Manoj Srivastava sent in a notice to prospective candidates for the Debian Project Leader elections. He intends to collect platform statements from the candidates, and publish them on a known location (somewhere under www.debian.org/vote) at the end of the nomination period and the beginning of the campaign, which makes it roughly the 27th of February, 2002. Voting shall start on the 21st of March, 2002, and shall last for 3 weeks, ending on the 10th of April. The first developer to nominate himself was Raphaƫl Hertzog and the second one was Bdale Garbee.

PHP4 Orphaned. Petr Czech orphaned PHP4 last week. The main reason cited was the lack of time required to maintain these packages and fix bugs in them. Adam Conrad offered to take over these packages and Petr will sponsor his packages until he eventually completes the new-maintainer process. Adam says that he is pretty familiar with the PHP source, and writes PHP modules on his own. Be warned, these packages need a rebuild or apt-get will remove them in favour of the new Apache packages.

Debian on Zaurus PDA. Joey Hess informed us that it looks like Sharp's Zaurus PDA (the one with the neat integrated keyboard) uses busybox dpkg and Debian packages. There's also a sourceforge project which covers open source development of tools, applications, and games for the Zaurus PDA.

Boot-Floppies 3.0.19. David Kimdon announced that the source of boot-floppies 3.0.19 was uploaded. A first problem with this upload has already been found, unfortunately -- it wasn't possible to load any network drivers on the idepci flavour. The problem appears to be a modconf bug which can be avoided by building with the modconf in testing. Oh dear! Attila Nagy also reported the first severe problem.

Commenting on Draft 1.2 of GNU FDL. The Free Software Foundation is seeking comments on draft 1.2 of the GNU FDL. The draft is here and they also provide a unified diff against version 1.1. The FSF is asking for feedback from the Free Software community on this draft. Please send comments to fdl-comments@fsf.org. The comment period is open until 1 March 2002.

New Bug-Squashing Party Next Weekend. Colin Watson announced the seventh Bug-Squashing Party which will take place from the 15th to 17th of February. The effort will be concentrated upon bugs in base and standard packages. Frivolous NMUs are to be avoided, but if there is a patch available and there has been no activity for a while, an NMU might be carried out. The party will be coordinated through the IRC channel #debian-bugs on OpenProjects, as usual.

Security Enhanced Debian. Russell Coker sent in a report about his effort on Debian packages including SE patches from the NSA for a system running an SE enabled kernel. The kernel patch required is already been uploaded to the Debian archive. Russell put new versions of core utilities online already. He is getting very close to having a working SE system.

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

Security Updates. You know the drill, please make sure that you update your systems if you have this package installed.

Orphaned Packages. 8 packages were orphaned this week and require a new maintainer. This makes a total of 111 orphaned packages. Many thanks to the previous maintainer 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.

Got News? Please inform us about everything that's going on in the Debian community. We are always looking for any interesting stories to add, especially new items by voluntary 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.