Debian Weekly News - June 20th, 2006
Welcome to this year's 25th issue of DWN, the weekly newsletter for the Debian community. Matt Brown created a couple of wrapper scripts around sbuild and debarchiver to automatically build uploaded packages. Isaac Clerencia reported that the Zaragoza City Hall has deployed a thin-client solution based on Debian in six elderly centres.
Homepage Location in Package Description. Kai Hendry pointed out that the way URLs are listed in package descriptions is a hack which in practice commonly differs from the Developer's reference. Margarita Manterola suggested to first patch dpkg with a Homepage field in order to address this problem in policy. Raphaƫl Hertzog finally recommended this meta field should be incorporated in a Web application of a collaborative repository of meta information for packages.
Debian Community Conference Italy. Marco Bertorello announced the Debian community conference to take place on the 16th and 17th September in Venice, Italy. This conference is organised by the Italian Debian community and aims at users, developers, translators and all those who love Debian.
On compressing PDF Files. Yaroslav Halchenko noticed
that about half of the PDF files distributed with Debian unstable are compressed into
.pdf.gz
files and cannot easily be read by commonly used PDF
readers. According to policy
large documents need to be compressed, but
PDF files are already compressed inside. Compressing the remaining PDF files
with gzip will only save about
50 MB while not compressing the compressed PDF files would cost about
150 MB of space.
Debian Mentors Site relaunched. Christoph Haas announced the relaunch of the mentors service that is dedicated to help package maintainers who are not yet Debian developers get their packages uploaded into Debian by sponsors. The new site has an improved web interface and several new features that are supposed to help bring package maintainers and sponsors together.
Executing System-V Style Init Script. Lars Wirzenius noted
that a lot of packages still don't make use of invoke-rc.d
in
their maintainer scripts. This is required by policy 3.7.2 and
a lintian check should be in
place already. According to the list of
release-critical issues for etch these
packages violate policy but this bug is not release-critical.
Hardly used orphaned Packages. Nathanael Nerode created a list of packages that are orphaned and have less than 20 recorded installations. These are candidates for removal as they have less than one installation in 500. He wondered if somebody would object filing removal requests since they clutter the archive and use the Debian infrastructure but nobody cares to maintain them. Bas Zoetekouw argued that even if only a few people use these packages, they are in use and should probably be kept if they're don't have release-critical bug reports.
Debian Day at FrOSCon. Joey announced that the Debian project organises a one-day conference during FrOSCon in Sankt Augustin, Germany, where it also maintains a booth. The conference will take place on Saturday, June 24th and aims at users and people interested in the structure of Debian.
Security Updates. You know the drill. Please make sure that you update your systems if you have any of these packages installed.
- DSA 1096: webcalendar -- Arbitrary code execution.
- DSA 1097: Linux 2.4.27 -- Several vulnerabilities.
- DSA 1098: horde3 -- Cross-site scripting.
- DSA 1099: horde2 -- Cross-site scripting.
- DSA 1100: wv2 -- Integer overflow.
New or Noteworthy Packages. The following packages were added to the unstable Debian archive recently or contain important updates.
- acpi-support — Collection of useful events for ACPI.
- advancecomp — Collection of recompression utilities.
- airport-utils — Configuration and management utilities for Apple AirPort base stations.
- bsc — Graphical file manager with two panels.
- buoh — Online comic-strip reader for GNOME.
- cobex — Connector for mobile devices.
- cpulimit — Limits the CPU usage of a process.
- digitools — Set of tools to control ASUS Digimatrix embedded hardware.
- dvipost — Post processor for DVI files supporting change bars.
- ekiga — H.323 and SIP compatible VOIP client.
- flumotion — Fluendo Streaming Server - manager, worker and admin.
- remote-tty — Multiuser "tip"/"cu" replacement with logging.
- systemtap — Instrumentation system for Linux 2.6.
- texlive-latex3 — TeX Live: Experimental LaTeX3 packages.
- tinyscheme — Very small scheme implementation.
- unpaper — Post-processing tool for scanned pages.
- vim-sisu — SiSU vim syntax highlighter and folder.
- xtlf — Single user (single node) version of tlf.
Orphaned Packages. 27 packages were orphaned this week and
require a new maintainer. This makes a total of 311 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. To find out which orphaned packages are
installed on your system the wnpp-alert
program from
devscripts
may be helpful.
- aleph — Aleph programming language - Emacs mode. (Bug#374120)
- apt-listbugs — Lists critical bugs before each apt installation. (Bug#374104)
- asiya24-vfont — Japanese Maru Gothic font in Zeit's Syotai Club format. (Bug#374105)
- autounit — Development files for C unit testing framework. (Bug#374124)
- celestia — Real-time visual space simulation (KDE frontend). (Bug#374534)
- cvsreport — Extract activity reports from a CVS repository. (Bug#373928)
- dcd — Command-line CD player. (Bug#374127)
- debnest — Nested Build System of Debian Source Package. (Bug#374106)
- debpartial — Debian Packages/Sources file partition tool. (Bug#374107)
- ecos — Deeply embedded operating system. (Bug#374108)
- feedparser — Universal Feed Parser for Python. (Bug#374499)
- fidogate — Gateway between FidoNet and Internet. (Bug#374520)
- gnurobots — Program a robot to explore a world. (Bug#374125)
- gst-python — GStreamer Python bindings (0.8). (Bug#374500)
- gst0.10-python — GStreamer Python bindings (0.10). (Bug#374501)
- libintl-gettext-ruby — Gettext wrapper for Ruby 1.6. (Bug#374109)
- libipc-shareable-perl — Access IPC shared memory segments through Perl. (Bug#374121)
- libmail-verp-perl — Variable Envelope Return Paths (VERP) address encoder/decoder. (Bug#374030)
- lphdisk — Prepares hibernation partition for Phoenix NoteBIOS. (Bug#374110)
- mt-st — Linux SCSI tape driver aware magnetic tape control (aka mt). (Bug#374122)
- phpreports — XML-based report generator for PHP. (Bug#374425)
- trueprint — Pretty printing of source code. (Bug#374128)
- ultrapossum — UltraPossum startTLS support module. (Bug#374111)
- ultrapossum-slapd — UltraPossum plugin to use slapd optimized for UltraPossum. (Bug#374112)
- vflib2 — Vector Font Library for Japanese Character Code. (Bug#374113)
- yank — Yet another notekeeper. (Bug#374129)
- zmailer — Mailer for Extreme Performance Demands. (Bug#373908)
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This issue of Debian Weekly News was edited by Kai Hendry, Sebastian Feltel, Christoph Haas and Martin 'Joey' Schulze.