Debian Weekly News - September 26th, 2006

Welcome to this year's 39th issue of DWN, the weekly newsletter for the Debian community. Jeroen van Wolffelaar announced a bug squashing party to be held in Utrecht, The Netherlands, from September 29th to October 1st. Manoj Srivastava announced that the general resolution on asset handling has passed. As Debian experiments with funding, the editor and main author of DWN is going to experiment with spending less time on Debian. Please understand that due to this there may be no future issues of DWN in the current form or that they will only be released less frequently.

Distributing DVD CSS from ftp.skolelinux.org? Petter Reinholdtsen wondered if libdvdcss2 could be distributed from ftp.skolelinux.org as there is no DMCA law in Norway. Holger Levsen stated that users in countries other then Norway might get into legal problems if this is done, and asked for legal advice. Alexander Schmehl pointed him to Gregory Pomerantz, the legal advisor of SPI.

Filibustering General Resolutions. Manoj Srivastava reported that due to a loop hole in the constitution, any group of 6 Debian developers can delay any general resolution indefinitely by putting up their own amendment. Due to past accusations he has decided that stopping this could be seen as abuse of his secretary powers and asked the project to determine how it wants to handle filibustering.

City of Munich migrates to Debian. The City of Munich announced (German only) that they have started migrating their desktops to a Debian-based computing platform. As part of the project called LiMux nearly 14,000 computers will be running a distribution based on sarge accompanied by more recent versions of popular productivity tools like KDE, OpenOffice.org and others.

Debian experiments with Funding. Howard Dahdah reported that Debian experiments with funding the release managers to release etch in time as previously announced. However, technically this is not the Debian project but this is how it is publicly received. Several developers are not happy with the Dunc-Tank and have raised concerns before it went public already.

Project Leader to be recalled? Denis Barbier proposed a general resolution to recall the project leader in order to remove any confusion whether the Debian project leader is involved in Dunc-Tank or not. The Computerworld article reported that Debian is experimenting while Dunc-Tank is officially outside of Debian. So it already failed to be seen as a separate entity.

Procedural Rules about General Resolutions. Manoj Srivastava announced procedural rulings about proposing and sponsoring general resolutions due to the high number of such resolutions and amendments. Every proposal must clearly indicate the bounds of the proposal and every proposal and sponsoring email must be signed with the cryptographic key that lives in the Debian keyrings.

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. 7 packages were orphaned this week and require a new maintainer. This makes a total of 306 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.

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 Martin Zobel-Helas, Sebastian Feltel and Martin 'Joey' Schulze.