Debian Weekly News - April 26th, 1999

Welcome to Debian Weekly News, a newsletter for the Debian developer community.

It's official -- Corel will base their Linux distribution on Debian. According to Corel's press release "Corel will also build its desktop Linux offering around the Debian GNU/Linux distribution, which already has one of the largest installed bases in the Linux community, and is known for its stability and security." Corel representatives are already making their first postings to the lists.

The Bug Tracking System went down on the 21st when the machine it resides on was upgraded to Linux 2.2 (to work around a SCSI problem). It seems Linux 2.2 doesn't completely support a.out binaries, and the BTS uses an old a.out smail binary that the upgrade broke. The BTS was down for 4 days before it could be fixed to use exim as its mailer. No data should have been lost, though some people submitting bugs in the downtime may have received odd messages from debbugs.debian.org.

Jason Gunthorpe, our very own BOFH, has been working on the long anticipated LDAP-enabled developer database, and has merged in everyone in the Debian keyring into it. The resulting database can be queried in many useful ways. Jason's first uses of it were to generate a report of people who are in the keyring but lack an account on master, and then to generate a list of accounts that are for people not in the Debian keyring. The BOFH element -- "All of these are on the chopping block and will be terminated 'eventually'". If you're on the list you should contact Jason.

Dale Scheetz has resigned from his post of Secretary of the SPI board, citing scarce free time that he'd rather spend on the LSB and other projects. Nils Lohner will probably become Secretary, and the board is expected to seek a new Treasurer.

In case you've not noticed, Debian has a web page listing y2k status of our packages. Craig Small is maintaining this page, and he has requested for people to mail him if you know of pages that address the y2k compliance of other packages.

Rotation of logfiles has been the topic of some discussions this week. There's been a proposal to move from using savelog to using logrotate (developed by Red Hat), since logrotate seems to be a more flexible tool and savelog can even lose data in some very rare situations. Logrotate has been packaged and uploaded.

All the new packages added to Debian this week are from the Hurd port:

Thanks to Randolph Chung for contributing the new packages list each week.


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This issue of Debian Weekly News was edited by Joey Hess.