Debian Weekly News - September 27th, 2005

Welcome to this year's 39th issue of DWN, the weekly newsletter for the Debian community. Ben Hutchings announced the availability of video DVDs of the DebConf talks. There has been some effort to convert the content of the old Wiki to the new Debian Wiki.

Collecting Boot Data. Jörg Sommer wanted to know where on the filesystem an init replacement could store its data. Martin Krafft suggested to keep the data in memory and dump them to a file at the end of the boot process. Later Jörg explained that the data will be stored temporarily in /run and moved to the final destination.

GL Library Duplication. Michael Biebl wondered why both X.Org and Mesa provide GL/GLU implementations as libraries and if there is an attempt to switch to only one of them in the long term. Marcelo Magallon explained the contents of the affected packages and that the user should know which driver they need.

Support for Libc Version 5. Jeroen van Wolffelaar wondered how long the old libc5 packages need to be supported by Debian, since libc6 has been released 7 years ago and since the Debian project does not provide security support for it. Roger Leigh added that Debian is the only common distribution that still ships binary packages for the older libc and suggested its removal.

Common Packaging Errors. Lars Wirzenius reported on widespread packaging bugs that he noticed during a piuparts run over the archive. These runs help detecting files that aren't included in the packages but also aren't removed during the installation or upon package removal. They are also able to detect calls to external programs on which packages don't properly depend.

Debian OpenSolaris Port? Andreas Schuldei encouraged developers to take part in discussions about the license of OpenSolaris with regards to a Debian port. The license is currently not approved by Debian due to its choice of venue clause.

NTP License Problems. Nathanael Nerode discovered several differently licensed pieces of code in the ntp package. Some of them don't seem to be distributable by Debian at all. Bdale Garbee identified the problems and proposed to remove questionable code from the package.

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.

Orphaned Packages. 3 packages were orphaned this week and require a new maintainer. This makes a total of 188 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 Martin 'Joey' Schulze.