Debian Weekly News - June 28th, 2005

Welcome to this year's 26th issue of DWN, the weekly newsletter for the Debian community. Rafael Laboissiere wondered if bug reports for woody can now be closed, but Frank Lichtenheld added that they should be kept if they are security related and that others may be useful to prevent others from reporting them again. Martin F. Krafft announced his new book that was introduced at LinuxTag.

Package Policy Committee. Branden Robinson officially founded the package policy committee that has the authority to handle the Debian policy manual. He appointed Manoj Srivastava (chair), Andreas Barth and Matt Zimmerman to maintain the document and define levels of conformance other standards.

Release Policy for Etch. Andreas Barth announced changes in the release policy for the etch release. It is now required that all content in main and contrib is DFSG-free. It is also not permitted that the changelog or build dependencies are altered during the build process.

XML Application Files. Christian Heller wondered where to place programs that are written in the XML-based language CYBOL and interpreted by CYBOI. Marc Brockschmidt asserted that this program and interpreter situation looks like Perl and hence should be handled in a similar way.

Conflicting Program Names. Sebastian Kuzminsky noticed that two packages provide a git binary. To avoid this file conflict the packages did conflict with each other, but this is seriously wrong. Steve Greenland asserted that renaming the cogito binary would make Debian incompatible with other distributions and kernel development.

Architecture-specific Packages. Russ Allbery maintains the OpenAFS which is not supported on four architectures. Goswin Brederlow explained three mechanisms that are used by the build daemons to avoid packages they shouldn't try to build. Packages-arch-specific is the proper resource for this type of packages.

TeXlive versus teTeX. Norbert Preining announced to package TeXlive, one of the most complete TeX systems. The advantage of TeXlive is a more fine-grained package structure, while teTeX would still be around and could make use of TeXlive modules. Frank Küster explained that both packages are well maintained but use a different style.

Debian Presentations in Peru. The DebianPeru user group started a series of presentations across the country to spread the word of Free Software and the new release of Debian, give an introduction into our philosophy and have fun. They will hand out CDs to attendees and send CD sets to the main cities as well.

New or Noteworthy Packages. The following packages were added to the unstable 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 219 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.