Debian Weekly News - April 6th, 1999
Welcome to Debian Weekly News, a newsletter for the Debian developer community. It's a day late and a bit short this week due to the editor's vacation.
The logo team has chosen 4 candidates for our new logo. Wichert has made a web page displaying 4 excellent new logos and our current logo. You can also read Wichert's commentary on each logo, which begins the one week discussion period before voting begins. At the same time, Wichert has proposed a vote on whether we should have a single logo or an official and a liberal use logo.
Neal Stephenson, award winning author of Snow Crash and other cyberpunk
science fiction turns out to be a user and fan of Debian. He's written an
article on
operating systems in which he enthuses about Debian and specifically about
the bug tracking system. "I use a distribution called Debian [...] what
really sold me on it was its phenomenal bug database
"
What's the buggiest package in Debian? It's easy to find out using Raphaƫl Hertzog's pages which score packages based on different criteria, including number of bugs, number of lintian errors, and ages of bugs. Also, the pages listing critical bug reports are back online, at a new location.
A 12 page "review of Debian 2.1 as a platform for econometric
research
" has been
written by James MacKinnon, an economics professor.
No new packages were added to Debian this week, though several are waiting in Incoming. There are some important updates to existing packages though:
- On the security front, a new procmail is out that fixes some buffer overflows.
- An official test build of XFree86 3.3.3.1 is available at last. Note that versions of X in Debian are not vulnerable to /tmp symlink race security holes that have been reported on bugtraq.
Corrections to last week's news:
- The sgml press release mentioned last week was in fact released right as last week's Debian Weekly News went to press.
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Back issues of this newsletter are available.
This issue of Debian Weekly News was edited by Joey Hess.