Debian Weekly News - July 25th, 2006

Welcome to this year's 30th issue of DWN, the weekly newsletter for the Debian community. Christoph Berg implemented an overview page for tasks in the packages overview. He also announced that the repository has been moved to Subversion and that notifications are now handled by the Package Tracking System directly.

DzongkhaLinux launched. The Debian project announced the release of DzongkhaLinux, a GNU/Linux distribution based on Debian GNU/Linux 3.1 that has been localised into Bhutan's national language. The system consists of one CD which can be either installed or used as a live system. The Bhutan Department of Information Technology chose Debian for its high versatility and reliability as well as the guarantee to always remain 100 % Free Software.

Consolidating SSL Certificates. Jaldhar Vyas wondered if Debian should change all SSL certificate using packages to use the snake oil certificate from the ssl-cert package. Petter Reinholdtsen explained that Debian-Edu already configures several services with SSL certificates automatically and that such a change would simplify this.

Dealing with Documentation Issues in Stable. Osamu Aoki (青木 修) asked for an faq tag for the bug tracking system. In many cases, a bug report against stable is a frequently asked question and the answer is hidden under an obscure location. Closing such bug reports or tagging them wontfix doesn't sound right.

Handling Assets for the Project. Manoj Srivastava proposed an amendment to the Debian constitution and sought seconds. This will bring the constitution in line with current needs and practices of handling assets globally, and allowing the project to add and remove partner organisations currently authorised to hold assets for Debian.

Package Tracking System Update. Raphaël Hertzog reported that the Package Tracking System can be used to relay information from derivative distributions as well. This allows interested people to receive regularly small patches instead of big monolithic ones. He is also seeking help for new features.

Release Status Update. Marc Brockschmidt commented on the etch release status. He clarified the meaning of the release goals and asked developers to work on lowering the number of critical issues affecting the release. Bug squashing parties will be organised around the world. The upcoming release will probably carry 4.0 as version number and may include Python 2.4, Linux 2.6.17 or newer, X.org and most of the architectures sarge was released for plus AMD64.

Finishing the /usr/doc Transition. Amaya Rodrigo Sastre asked for a semi-automatic way to test the archive again to make sure there are no more packages installing a symlink under /usr/doc. Stefan Hühner suggested the use of an existing lintian check. Joey Hess confirmed that this is the way he initially used to report bugs and Luk Claes added that piuparts is also useful for such a check.

Beta 3 of the Debian Installer. Frans Pop announced the start of the third beta release of the debian-installer now that Linux 2.6.16 is available in etch. He explained that the installer consumes more memory because of crypto support which will be improved after the beta release and due to more supported languages.

Labelling enhanced CD/DVD Sets. Radu-Cristian Fotescu wondered how prominent a distributor of an enhanced sarge CD needs to mark that it's not an official and original sarge CD. MJ Ray pointed out that the official designation may only be used for official CDs and that changed CDs are to be labelled unofficial.

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. 40 packages were orphaned this week and require a new maintainer. This makes a total of 355 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.

Removed Packages. 10 packages have 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 and Martin 'Joey' Schulze.