Debian Weekly News - January 24th, 2006

Welcome to this year's 4th issue of DWN, the weekly newsletter for the Debian community. The Debian listmasters have decided to revoke posting permission to a developer centric announce list for a person pointing out that off-topic mails should be sent elsewhere in a rather sarcastic and potentially offensive fashion.

Helping the Debian GNOME Team. Josselin Mouette asked for help with bug triage from Debian GNOME users in order to clean up the large number of bugs that currently clutter the BTS on GNOME Team packages. Interested parties should find packages needing attention using the package tracking system. He also noted that those familiar with GNOME packages are welcome to join the team itself.

Debian on LVM2 on RAID. Emidio Planamente wrote a document that describes how to install Debian sarge on a logical volume (LV) that resides on a number of disks merged together with RAID. The /boot directory that contains the initial ram-disk and the kernel needs to be outside of the LVM, though.

Kaffe Compiler Transition. Wolfgang Baer announced new kaffe packages that use ecj as their default compiler which has been discussed with upstream and other Debian Java maintainers at the Linux developers meeting in Oldenburg. This transition affects about 110 source package of which only five fail to build and need a little care.

Web Forums for Debian. Andreas Schuldei stated that Debian is weak in forum based support structures. Steve Langasek explained that most people in the Debian community despise web forums. Michael Banck added that Debian should be very careful whether it officially adopts a web forum as part of its support facilities and that the project will have to be present and mediate when needed.

Translated Copyright Notice. Tobias Toedter wondered if he should translate the GNU GPL copyright notice when it is presented via gettext. While it seems to be better to leave the license itself untranslated the copyright notice may be translated as Henning Makholm pointed out.

Draft GPLv3 released. Don Armstrong published the draft license of the GNU GPL version 3 that was released at the GPLv3 launch conference. It contains a special paragraph about digital restriction management and explicitly outlaws to sue others for patent infringement when the software is released under this license.

Debian Architecture Qualification. Anthony Towns announced alpha, amd64, hppa, i386, ia64, mips, mipsel and powerpc as release architectures and provided the log of the IRC conference with regards to architecture qualification for the Debian archive.

Treating Paper Copies. Frank Küster wondered whether a printed version of a document released under the GPL would be "object code" as treated in section 3 of the license. Jeremy Hankins affirmed this and referred to a lawyer. Nathanael Nerode stated that the GPLv3 says that object code means any non-source version of a work.

Non-free Non-code? In light of the current debate on the upcoming general resolution Gerfried Fuchs reported about graphics in a free package that were rendered by non-free software and about the Debian logo whose license is non-free as well. As a result a lot of packages would have to be moved to non-free.

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. Due to packages.debian.org being down because of performance issues we are unable to provide the regular list of new packages.

Orphaned Packages. 27 packages were orphaned this week and require a new maintainer. This makes a total of 202 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. 13 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 Christine Spang and Martin 'Joey' Schulze.