Debian Weekly News - December 6th, 2005

Welcome to this year's 49th issue of DWN, the weekly newsletter for the Debian community. Roland Stigge planned to file bugs against packages that provide no pristine source package, but are not native Debian packages either. Andreas Barth announced that the LDAP gateway to the bug tracking system has been moved to a new host with a configurable address.

General Resolution: Opening the Archive. Manoj Srivastava announced the discussion period for the general resolution about the Declassification of debian-private list archives. Anthony Towns has proposed this resolution in accordance with principles of openness and transparency to declassify and publish posts of historical or ongoing significance made to the private mailing list.

Final Debian Conference 5 Report. Fabian Fagerholm announced the final report about this year's Debian Conference in Helsinki. The document is intended for those who attended the conference and the general public. It includes impressions and facts from the conference. A more detailed financial report will be available later.

Temporary Directories per User? Noah Meyerhans reported about a discussion within the security team to push the use of per-user temporary directories as default. With proper code this is only a question of an adjusted PAM configuration. However, some programs hardcode the /tmp directory.

C++ Transition Status Update. Nathanael Nerode reported about the transition of C++ libraries due to the use of a different memory allocator in the standard C++ library. Two libraries are still linked to an older library version and can be ignored, five packages still need to be transitioned regularly, five other packages haven't been built on all architectures yet and a large number of libraries still need to be transitioned.

Device Nodes with udev. Miles Bader noticed that several old-style device nodes were created after booting a Debian kernel with udev also installed. Marco d'Itri explained that they result from the kernel configuration. However their creation can easily be prevented with a proper configuration file for udev.

New Kernel Package. Manoj Srivastava announced new features in the new kernel-package package which has undergone a major restructuring. Ramdisk generation has been improved and can now be controlled via a configuration variable. The kernel image maintainer scripts now use debconf and the post-installation script has become less verbose by that.

Determining the intended Debian Version. Christopher Crammond wondered if there is a way to determine which version of Debian a given package belongs to. Marc Brockschmidt explained that almost all packages in stable have been uploaded to unstable before, were migrated to testing and then were released as stable.

Dropping Kerberos 4 Packages? Andreas Barth noticed that the krb4 packages accumulate several release-critical bugs that are difficult to fix and that their upstream doesn't seem to be active anymore. Russ Allbery added that MIT Kerberos is also going to drop Kerberos v4 support as of May of 2006.

Dropping Support for GCC 2.95? Thiemo Seufer wondered how many users GCC 2.95 still has. Since only 9 packages declare build dependencies on it, he proposed to remove this compiler version from etch before its release.

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. 4 packages were orphaned this week and require a new maintainer. This makes a total of 192 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. 24 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 Martin 'Joey' Schulze.