Debian Weekly News - April 4th, 2006

Welcome to this year's 14th issue of DWN, the weekly newsletter for the Debian community. Robert Millan reported that he has built a CD installer image for GNU/kFreeBSD on AMD64. Joey Schulze earlier announced that the changelog files have been regenerated on the new packages.debian.org system.

Moving GFDL Documentation to non-free. After the Debian Project decided upon the freeness of documentation released under the GNU Free Documentation license (GFDL), Jérôme Marant wondered about the best way to move non-free parts from his emacs package to non-free. Jörg Jaspert answered that the source tarball has to be split into two parts and that the free source package should not be renamed.

Debian Project Leader Election. Manoj Srivastava called for votes for the third time for this year's project leader election. Debian developers can cast their ballots until April 8th and may base their decision on the platforms of the leader candidates.

Extending Voting Privileges? Clytie Siddall complained about the fact that only Debian developers are eligible to cast a ballot for the project leader election. Mako Hill would also like to see those who have made long-term, sustained, and significant contributions to be recognised more significantly, maybe through a new enfranchised category of contributor. Wouter Verhelst asserted that the major problem is the proper identification of regularly contributors.

DFSG-Free IETF License. Simon Josefsson wondered if the proposed license of a recently approved IETF document that contains reference code for SHA-2 is sufficiently free according to Debian's guidelines (DFSG). Steve Langasek asserted that the license grants permission to use, copy, redistribute and create derivative works which makes it clearly DFSG-compliant.

Oracle Repository for Debian. Frits Hoogland reported about Oracle's apt repository containing Oracle Express Edition. Since the Oracle database is an important part of the infrastructure of many companies, this repository simplifies deployment of Debian based database servers in these environments. At this time, the repository supports Debian unstable (sid) only.

Debian Conference Video License. Holger Levsen proposed to apply the "by attribution" license, version 2.5, with the changes for Scottish legislation for past and future conference videos instead of a MIT-style license. Don Armstrong suggested to postpone any move from a non-controversially DFSG free license to one that is controversial until these issues are dealt with.

Freeness of the NDIS Wrapper. Robert Millan claimed that the ndiswrapper belongs in the contrib section instead of main since its purpose is to run non-free drivers. The only free one is a port of the Linux driver. Michael Poole, however, compared the situation with another package that is useless on its own but require input from third parties.

Testing Sarge to Etch Upgrades. Lars Wirzenius reported about his effort to test the upgrade path from sarge to etch. This test basically went fine. Raphaël Hertzog added that tests to install all packages which are listed in a particular task and then to upgrade them should be included as well.

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. 5 packages were orphaned this week and require a new maintainer. This makes a total of 275 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. 1 package has been removed from the Debian archive during the past week:

Want to continue reading DWN? Please help us create this newsletter. We still need more volunteer writers who watch the Debian community and report about what is going on. Please see the contributing page to find out how to help. We're looking forward to receiving your mail at dwn@debian.org.


To receive this newsletter weekly in your mailbox, subscribe to the debian-news mailing list.

Back issues of this newsletter are available.

This issue of Debian Weekly News was edited by Mohammed Adnène Trojette, Sebastian Feltel, Adrian von Bidder and Martin 'Joey' Schulze.