Debian Weekly News - October 25th, 2005

Welcome to this year's 43rd issue of DWN, the weekly newsletter for the Debian community. Jörg Jaspert noticed that the rate of package rejections out of the NEW queue is rising, mostly due to incomplete copyright files and suggested to investigate the included files before the upload. Debian users in Japan will hold Debian mini conference in Osaka, Japan at the coming weekend (28th and 29th of October).

Etch Release Progress. Steve Langasek thanked those who have spent large amounts of time on the sarge release and proposed a timeline for the release of etch. This allows for the first freeze of the toolchain and kernel in July and a general freeze in October. Meeting these milestones would then lead to a release of etch in December 2006.

Graphical Debian-Installer. Christian Perrier reported about the graphical frontend to the debian-installer as part of the most recent minutes of the monthly Debian Installer team meeting. Davide Viti earlier announced a nearly working graphical installer and a small ISO image for trial.

Port Assignments during System Boot. Gernot Salzer noticed that some network ports get assigned dynamically during the boot process and sometimes clash with daemons that use fixed ports. Javier Fernández-Sanguino Peña explained that the assignment happens inside the GNU C library and started the portsreserve package to prevent such cases.

Default local Hostname. Christoph Haas discovered that the local hostname after the installation defaults to localhost.localdomain instead of just localhost. Joey Hess explained that the configuration has already been changed after the sarge release in reaction to Bug#247734.

Plus Signs in Package Names. Andres Salomon intended to rename the binary packages of mysql++ package from libsqlplus1 to libmysql++ since several users were confused by the older name and wondered if the plus signs could pose a problem for the packaging tools. Henning Glawe pointed out that the plus sign has a special meaning for apt-get but Henning Makholm added that this doesn't matter here since the soname will have to be added to it anyway.

S-Lang Module Naming. Rafael Laboissiere noted that there is currently no policy about naming S-Lang modules. Applications such as slsh or slrn are prefixed with "sl" while modules for other languages use the full name of the language in the package name. He acknowledged to rename the package to slang-gdbm as this module is more interesting for S-Lang developers.

Pbuilder Status Update. Junichi Uekawa (上川 純一) reported that he has moved the development to Alioth as a preparation for team maintenance and switched to cdebootstrap. For several distributions dependencies are not resolved with regards to priorities, though. They could be adjusted en bloc or during the entire development cycle before the release.

Proposed teTeX Transition. Frank Küster wondered if there is a possibility to prevent a normal transition for teTeX packages since the new version 3.0 should be available in unstable but release managers have asked him not to start another transition at the moment. Andreas Barth agreed that providing the old library version for a while would help and not block packages as usual.

New uClibc Ports. Daniel Ruoso is interested in an i386 port of Debian based on the uClibc instead of the GNU C library for older and slower hardware. Simon Richter is in need of a big endian ARM port using uClibc for embedded systems and proposed to exchange only a small set of packages with their uClibc versions. Riku Voipio pointed to the woody port using uClibc.

cURL Status Update. Domenico Andreoli updated the cURL package in the experimental suite so that one variant is linked against OpenSSL and another is linked against GNU TLS. This will fix license problems with applications released under the GNU GPL that are indirectly linked against OpenSSL.

PHP License for PEAR Packages? Piotr Roszatycki wondered how to handle packages in the Debian archive that use the PHP license for something that is not PHP itself since one such package was rejected from the archive. Jörg Jaspert pointed out that the license isn't suited for modules and applications written in or for PHP but only for the core PHP language itself.

New Source Packages and Binaries. Frank Küster noticed that a new source package that provides existing binary package does not have to go through NEW processing. This way accidentally overwritten binary packages won't get noticed before they reach the archive. Jeroen van Wolffelaar explained that this will soon change.

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. 7 packages were orphaned this week and require a new maintainer. This makes a total of 204 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.

Removed Packages. 2 packages have been removed from the Debian archive during the past week:

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