Debian Weekly News - March 21st, 2006

Welcome to this year's 12th issue of DWN, the weekly newsletter for the Debian community. Robert Millan built CD installer images for installing kfreebsd-amd64 as a standalone system. The OpenVZ project announced pre-built templates for virtual Debian servers that allow fast provisioning.

Status of the AMD64 Port. Anthony Towns reported about the inclusion of amd64 in Debian. The packages from build-essential are first rebuilt and uploaded and will be followed by the rest of the archive. Maintainer uploads of amd64 packages are currently blocked, and will remain that way until the archive's rebuilt.

Debian-Installer Etch Beta 2. Frans Pop announced the second etch beta release of the debian-installer and thanked all contributors who helped with this release, especially those from Ubuntu. The graphical installer is not part of this release although significant progress has been made in its development. Installation CDs and other media are available.

Expulsion Process for Developers. Christoph Berg asked other developers to think at least twice when sending a request to remove a developer in accordance with the Procedure for the expulsion of Debian Developers. In his opinion only the person who shall be removed should decide to make the process public, not the requester, as described in the process.

Project Leader Interview. Rebecca Sobol interviewed Branden Robinson about his tenure as Debian Project Leader. Branden discussed the "Project Scud" leadership team, some of the things which have happened in Debian over the past year, and why he isn't running for re-election.

Debian Project Leader Debate. Manoj Srivastava made this year's Debian project leader debate logs available. Candidates had to answer Don Armstrong's questions about their motivations for running for DPL and their opinions on some social issues in Debian. The debate was then up for open discussion. Thaddeus H. Black also published a list of all questions that were proposed for this debate.

JBoss Application Server for Debian. Torsten Schlabach asked about the packaging status for JBoss4. Guido Guenther pointed to the appropriate subversion repository, explained the next necessary steps and asked for help with packaging the JBoss Application Server.

Debian Project Leader Election. Manoj Srivastava called for votes for this year's project leader election. Developers can cast their ballot until April 8th, 2006. Seven candidates nominated themselves this year. Eligible voters should first read the full text of the platforms and rebuttals.

Preferred Documentation Types. Hendrik Sattler wondered which documentation types (HTML, PS, PDF, text) should be included in a Debian package. Wouter Verhelst asked to stick to HTML since HTML files can be easily searched and there are many viewers available for HTML, which also make it easy to print.

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. 42 packages were orphaned this week and require a new maintainer. This makes a total of 263 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 Mohammed Adnène Trojette, Andre Lehovich, Jochen Rassler and Martin 'Joey' Schulze.