Debian Weekly News - July 4th, 2006
Welcome to this year's 27th issue of DWN, the weekly newsletter for the Debian community. Andreas Barth announced that four more assistants have been added to the release team. There are rumours to start a port of Debian to the recently freed Minix 3 operating system. Steve Kemp noted that he has become a full member of the security team recently which now consists of four full members.
Python Policy Transition. Raphaël Hertzog reported that the infrastructure for the Python policy transition is in place. The instructions contain detailed descriptions how to update existing Python packages. About 60 % of the Python modules have already been updated and only about 100 packages are left.
Spanish Planet Debian. David Moreno Garza announced that a Spanish variant of the popular feed aggregator Planet Debian has been set up on planeta.debian.net, comprising 10 people at the moment. More people writing about Debian in Spanish are welcome to be added there.
Five Years of DWN. Martin 'Joey' Schulze has been editing the Debian Weekly News for the last five years. The DWN is a weekly online edition which informs about what is going on in the Debian community and was first published in 1999 by Joey Hess. Many thanks to all the contributors and editors of the last seven years. If you want to help, please read the contributing page and jump in!
Package Selections for Debian Live. Daniel Baumann asked for suggestions for package selections for the three Debian Live CD images to fit the user's needs best. The small image will contain only packages of standard priority, and three larger ones will contain one of the common desktop-environments: GNOME, KDE, XFCE.
Project Leader Updates. Steve McIntyre reported that a new stable update is expected soon which will contain an updated debian-installer for the first time. He stated that etch is still targeted for release by the end of this year and asked for help. He also announced a report about the trip of David Moreno Garza to Cuba.
Debian Flash Group. Paul Wise announced the creation of the Debian flash group that aims to support the free flash community. For Debian packages the pkg-flash project on Alioth has been started. Maintainers of flash-related packages are invited to participate in this and add their packages.
LSB Scripts and multiple Output Lines. Martin Krafft wondered how to implement an init script which is LSB-conforming and also produces multiple sub-lines of output. Daniel Jacobowitz suggested to generate totally independent lines instead.
Security Updates. You know the drill. Please make sure that you update your systems if you have any of these packages installed.
- DSA 1104: OpenOffice.org -- Several vulnerabilities.
New or Noteworthy Packages. The following packages were added to the unstable Debian archive recently or contain important updates.
- cvschangelogbuilder — Perl utility to generate ChangeLogs or HTML CVS reports.
- democracyplayer — GTK+ based RSS video aggregator.
- dialign — Segment-based multiple sequence alignment.
- emacs-jabber — Jabber client for Emacsen.
- kalign — Global and progressive multiple sequence alignment.
- kscope — Source editing environment for KDE.
- latexmk — Perl script for running LaTeX the correct number of times.
- mp3val — Program for MPEG audio stream validation.
- nexuiz — 3D network deathmatch game.
- num-utils — Programs for dealing with numbers from the command line.
- otrs2 — Open Ticket Request System Version 2.
- postgis — Geographic objects support for PostgreSQL.
- probcons — PROBabilistic CONSistency-based multiple sequence alignment.
- rcov — Code coverage tool for Ruby.
- swapspace — Dynamic swap space manager.
- texlive — TeX Live: A decent selection of the TeX live packages.
- tworld — Chip's Challenge Game Engine Emulation.
- xprintidle — Small utility that prints user's idle time in X.
- xwota — GTK client to the WOTA Database.
Orphaned Packages. 1 package was orphaned this week and
require a new maintainer. This makes a total of 315 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.
- pythoncard — wxPython-based GUI construction framework. (Bug#375610) (Bug#375781)
Removed Packages. 3 packages have been removed from the Debian archive during the past week:
- gandalf — C library for image processing and computer vision
Bug#263047: Request of QA, old, unused, unmaintained, rc buggy - intuitively — Automatic IP configuration detection for laptops
Bug#304169: Request of maintainer, obsolete, alternatives exist - bcm43xx — Broadcom 43xx Wireless LAN driver module for Linux 2.6.15-1-amd64
Bug#374990: Request of maintainer, unsupported in kernel 2.6.16, superseded by 2.6.17
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This issue of Debian Weekly News was edited by Sebastian Feltel, Mohammed Adnène Trojette and Martin 'Joey' Schulze.