Debian Weekly News - June 1st, 2004

Welcome to this year's 22nd issue of DWN, the weekly newsletter for the Debian community. This was a very quiet week, probably since many Debian developers are attending this year's Debian conference. Peter Palfrader announced that he is organising a keysigning party at this year's LinuxTag. If you want to participate, please submit your key no later than June 19th.

Notes from the Debian Conference. Junichi Uekawa has posted notes he has taken during Debian Conference 4, including terse descriptions of the following sessions: Joey Hess on Debian Installer, Scott James Remnant on GNU build tools, Steve Langasek on Dependency in Debian, Matt Taggart's Backporting BOF, Ian Murdock on Componentised Linux, Kenshi Muto and Christian Perrier on internationalisation and Benjamin Mako Hill's SPI Workshop.

Central Hardware Database. Zenaan Harkness wondered whether it would make sense to set up a centralised website/database where hardware manufacturers and individuals could submit hardware information. Clint Adams pointed to PCI IDs effort. Knoppix hardware information submission page, there is linuxprinting.org and the hardware database from Mandrake.

Rewriting the DFSG. Henning Makholm has been toying with the possibility of rewriting the Debian Free Software Guidelines (DFSG) such that it enumerates which things a free license can do, rather than just give examples of things it cannot. The current draft shows that the whole truth cannot be condensed into the ten commandments.

Report from Linuxwochen, Vienna. Gerfried Fuchs reported that the Linuxwochen, Vienna has been a great success. The show was split into two business oriented and two community oriented talks. He also gave a talk on Debian packaging. On the third evening they had a panel discussion with politicians about software patents.

Debian 3.1 LinuxTag Preview DVD. Jörg Jaspert announced the sarge preview DVD Debian people are preparing for LinuxTag. It is based on an image made by Gaudenz Steinlin and contains packages for both the i386 and powerpc architecture. Due to the not so limited space requirement multiple languages will be supported on this DVD.

Security Updates. You know the drill. Please make sure that you update your systems if you have any of these packages installed.

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

Debian Packages introduced last Week. Every day, a different Debian package is featured from the testing distribution. If you know about an obscure package you think others should also know about, send it to Andrew Sweger. Debian package a day introduced the following packages last week.

Orphaned Packages. 3 packages were orphaned this week and require a new maintainer. This makes a total of 165 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.

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This issue of Debian Weekly News was edited by Andre Lehovich and Martin 'Joey' Schulze.