Debian Weekly News - March 14th, 2006
Welcome to this year's 11th issue of DWN, the weekly newsletter for the Debian community. Raphaƫl Hertzog started to write down the design of a collaborative maintenance infrastructure and created a mailing list for further discussions.
Debian QA Meeting in Extremadura. Martin Michlmayr called for participation at the Debian Quality Assurance meeting in December in Extremadura, Spain. It is intended to help coordinate the QA work in Debian and is limited to 20 people. The Region of Extremadura will kindly cover travel expenses for attendants from Europe.
Debian Backup Server. Joey Schulze announced a dedicated backup server for important Debian resources excluding the buildd systems. The backup of a resource consists of 10 to 100 versions. Since a history of changes is maintained on the backup machine Debian administration can roll back a resource to an older version and also extract differences between past versions on demand.
Updates from the Debian Kernel Team. Bastian Blank reported about the work of the Debian kernel team. The most visible
change is the move from kernel-image-
packages to
linux-image-
packages. There has also been excitement about a
new x86 SMP patch, which would allow a reduction in the current number of flavours.
They are also working on adding VServer, Xen and UML flavours to
linux-2.6.
Martin 'Joey' Schulze steps down as Stable Release Manager. After continuous discrepancies with the ftpmasters, Martin 'Joey' Schulze has now resigned from his position as Stable Release Manager. He has held that position since 2001 and it will now be taken over by Andreas Barth and Martin Zobel-Helas.
Results of the General Resolution about the GFDL. Manoj Srivastava announced that the Debian project has decided that works licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL) without unmodifiable sections are free. 369 Debian developers took part in this general resolution, 428 ballots have been received in total.
The Role of the Project Leader. Martin Michlmayr reflected on the role of the leader of the Debian project (DPL). He basically states that the DPL can't solve all problems and that an often called strong leader won't be followed either. Instead of asking the DPL what they'll do to solve the problems he suggested the developers to ask themselves what they could do to improve the situation.
Influencing Haskell Development. Isaac Jones asked the Debian community to look at Haskell98 and some of the "research" extensions and give upstream developers some input about what would make Haskell more attractive. He is trying to make Haskell more suitable for practical applications and reported on efforts to develop CPAN-like and apt-get-like systems for it.
Security Updates. You know the drill. Please make sure that you update your systems if you have any of these packages installed.
- DSA 988: squirrelmail -- Several vulnerabilities.
- DSA 989: zoph -- SQL injection.
- DSA 990: bluez-hcidump -- Denial of service.
- DSA 991: zoo -- Arbitrary code execution.
- DSA 992: ffmpeg -- Arbitrary code execution.
- DSA 993: gnupg -- Broken signature check.
- DSA 994: freeciv -- Denial of service.
- DSA 995: metamail -- Arbitrary code execution.
- DSA 996: libcrypt-cbc-perl -- Cryptographic weakness.
- DSA 997: bomberclone -- Arbitrary code execution.
- DSA 998: libextractor -- Several vulnerabilities.
- DSA 999: lurker -- Several vulnerabilities.
- DSA 1000: libapreq2-perl -- Denial of service.
- DSA 1001: crossfire -- Arbitrary code execution.
New or Noteworthy Packages. The following packages were added to the unstable Debian archive recently or contain important updates.
- dspam -- Scalable, fast and statistical anti-spam filter.
- exfalso -- Audio tag editor for GTK+.
- fullquottel -- Tool for recognising mails/postings in tofu/top-posting style.
- gnudoq -- Open Source, graphical Su Doku generator and solver with printer support.
- gtimelog -- Minimal timelogging system.
- network-manager -- Network management framework daemon.
- nwutil -- Netwinder hardware utilities.
- pyroman -- Firewall configuration tool for complex networks.
- selinux-basics -- SELinux basic support.
- ssft -- Shell Scripts Frontend Tool.
- stroq -- Polarium/Chokkan Hitofude clone.
Orphaned Packages. 4 packages were orphaned this week and require a new maintainer. This makes a total of 234 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.
- unifont -- X11 dual-width GNU Unicode font. (Bug#356594)
- visualboyadvance -- Full featured Game Boy Advance emulator. (Bug#355777)
- wmdonkeymon -- Shows the status of edonkey's downloads in progress. (Bug#356667)
- wmmisc -- Dock app that monitors your system. (Bug#356588)
Removed Packages. 27 packages have been removed from the Debian archive during the past week:
- swt-motif -- Standard Widget Toolkit for Motif JAR library
Bug#316763: Request of maintainer, buggy and mostly unused - libkpathsea-perl -- Perl interface to Kpathsea library and mktex* replacements
Bug#336478: Request of maintainer, outdated; better solutions exist - cpbk -- Mirroring utility for backing up your files
Bug#341724: Request of maintainer, dead upstream, alternatives exist: unison - kbanking -- Development files for KDE bindings of AqBanking
Bug#351033: Request of maintainer, merged into libaqbanking - db2 -- Berkeley database routines
Bug#351179: Request of QA, RC-buggy, superseded by db4.3 - ddrmat -- Linux kernel driver for using Playstation dancing mats (source)
Bug#351481: Request of maintainer, obsoleted by linux-2.6, hardware unavailability - pymodplug -- ModPlug mod-like music shared libraries [Python bindings]
Bug#351483: Request of maintainer, dead upstream, mostly unused - pyflac -- Free Lossless Audio Codec [Python bindings]
Bug#351484: Request of maintainer, obsolete - mol-modules-2.6.12 -- Mac-on-Linux emulator - kernel modules
Bug#351899: Request of maintainer, out-of-date - tclxml -- Tcl library for XML parsing
Bug#352330: Request of QA, has never been part of a stable release, orphaned, RC bugs, functionality available elsewhere - libapache-mod-security -- Tighten web applications security for Apache 1.x
Bug#352344: Request of maintainer, undistributable for legal reasons - rhdb-explain -- Tool for visualising the output of the PostgreSQL EXPLAIN command
Bug#352422: Request of maintainer, obsolete, functionality superseded by pgadmin3 - pointless -- Presentation tool based on OpenGL
Bug#352558: Request of maintainer, dead upstream, few users - pcmcia-modules-2.4.27-i386 -- PCMCIA modules for Linux (kernel 2.4.27-2-386)
Bug#352843: Request of maintainer, obsolete, FTBFS - openmosixview -- Graphical tool to manage an openmosix cluster
Bug#353416: Request of maintainer, depends on removed openmosix - openh323gk -- Transitional package
Bug#353437: Request of maintainer, obsolete transitional package for gnugk - ean13 -- Create an EAN-13 or UPC barcode in .xbm format
Bug#353521: Request of QA, under-maintained, functionality superseded by barcode, kbarcode - hsftp -- SSH client with look and feel of an FTP client
Bug#353541: Request of maintainer, insecure, alternatives exist - saoimage -- Utility for displaying and processing astronomical images
Bug#354209: Request of maintainer, superseded by saods9 - matrox-tvout -- Configure a Matrox G550 for NTSC TV output
Bug#354616: Request of maintainer, dead upstream - imageviewer -- Image Viewer for GNUstep
Bug#354785: Request of maintainer, superseded by preview.app; FTBFS - gnustep-antlr -- Objective-C Classes Needed for ANTLR Compatibility
Bug#354788: Request of maintainer, orphaned, broken - gnustep-gd -- Objective-C Interface to the GD Graphics Library
Bug#354789: Request of maintainer, orphaned, broken - simpleui.bundle -- Theme bundle for GNUstep
Bug#354791: Request of maintainer, orphaned, broken, superseded by camaleon - ircd -- IRC Server daemon - dummy package
Bug#355270: Request of QA, obsolete dummy package, superseded by ircd-ircu - bluez-sdp -- Dummy package for BlueZ SDP library.
Bug#355322: Request of maintainer, obsolete dummy package - po-debiandoc -- Tools for helping translation of DebianDoc-SGML documents
Bug#356198: Request of maintainer, dead upstream, superseded by po4a
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This issue of Debian Weekly News was edited by Meike Reichle and Martin 'Joey' Schulze.