Debian Weekly News - August 24th, 2004

Welcome to this year's 33rd issue of DWN, the weekly newsletter for the Debian community. A lot of work has been done to help release sarge soon. Several recommendations and removals were requested on the debian-release list. Claus Fischer even requested to document important issues in the release notes. Jeroen van Wolffelaar asked maintainers to answer some questions if they maintain one or more packages with different versions in sarge and sid in order to help the release management.

KDE Package Descriptions. Enrico Zini noticed that the description of many packages containing KDE components start with the same four line text describing KDE. He believes that it would make more sense to first describe the package and then describe KDE. This affects 75 packages.

Reusing a Package Name? Jesus Gonzalez-Barahona wondered if he could reuse cil as package name for the C Intermediate Language since Debian already ships Chess in Lisp in its stable release. Peter Van Eynde revealed that the package was renamed. Thomas Viehmann explained that most systems upgraded from woody to sarge and only then to etch won't have a cil package anymore due to its renaming.

Web Application Maintenance. Kai Hendry tried to unify maintenance of web application in Debian. He asserted that their installation is often painful since they need to modify a database and the webserver. The mysql-server supports a debian-sys-maint super user which can setup users and databases. A proper mechanism for Apache is not yet implemented, though.

Viewing the Buildd Queue. Andrew Pollock wondered if there was an easy way to view the buildd progress other than buildd.debian.org and www.buildd.org. Michael Koch contributed this page by Ian Lynagh. Goswin von Brederlow mentioned the per-architecture index pages that link to more detailed lists of packages.

No free Debian Logo? Roger Leigh recently noticed that the grub package has splash image support but no splash images. Robert Millan later wondered if the "Open Use" logo is DFSG-free. David Schleef confirmed that the Debian Open Use Logo License is generally considered to be non-DFSG free.

On closing Bug Reports. Norbert Tretkowski asserted that regardless of the severity of a bug report, closing it with a comment like "who cares?" is not okay. And there is obviously at least one person who cares about this particular problem: the submitter of that bug report. He added that if the maintainer doesn't want to fix a bug, it should be tagged wontfix.

HP taps Debian for Carrier Grade Linux. LinuxDevices.com wrote that HP will supply Motorola with a Carrier Grade Linux version of Debian, as part of a long-term deal. The article mentions that Motorola required features not available in currently shipping GNU/Linux distributions. HP thus decided to roll its own Carrier Grade Linux based on the Debian operating system.

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. 19 packages were orphaned this week and require a new maintainer. This makes a total of 174 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.

Want to continue reading DWN? Please help us create this newsletter. We still need more volunteer writers who watch the Debian community and report about what is going on. Please see the contributing page to find out how to help. We're looking forward to receiving your mail at dwn@debian.org.


To receive this newsletter weekly in your mailbox, subscribe to the debian-news mailing list.

Back issues of this newsletter are available.

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