Debian Weekly News - May 10th, 1999
Welcome to Debian Weekly News, a newsletter for the Debian developer community.
Richard Braakman posted about plans for the next release of Debian. He listed several possible goals for the next release, including no release critical bugs, working disk sets for all architectures, PAM support, perl 5.005, and FHS compliance. "The freeze is at least one month away, and possibly a lot more than that."
Dave Neil of Corel posted about what Corel's planning to do with Debian. He discusses how Corel plans to modify the Debian install procedure for their distribution -- including an X based installation. They seem very open to feedback from the Debian community.
In security news, rsync has a security hole that can be triggered in rare cases. A fix has been uploaded to stable and unstable. A security hole has also been fixed in zmailer.
Anthony Towns posted about IPv6 and Debian. A debian-ipv6 mailing list has been created. There is some minimal support for IPv6 in potato's netbase, and several other packages have been built with IPv6 support and are available at locations listed in the message.
The Debian JP project released slink-JP this week, which consists of over 200 Japanese related Debian packages. According to this mail, the members of Debian JP are interested in becoming Debian developers as well and merging their work into the Debian project.
The debian-policy mailing list has been heating up lately, and a lot of proposals are now in the pipeline. These include adopting the FHS, creating a utmp group, adding libtool .la files to -dev packages, and using logrotate instead of savelog. For details, read the weekly policy summary.
If you're using Debian Sparc, beware -- the glibc2.1 uploaded last week is still not completely there yet and tends to hose systems. For now the brave are advised to run at least a 2.2.7 kernel before upgrading to glibc2.1.1.
Unofficial packages of the latest version of KDE are now available for i386 and alpha. Ivan E. Moore has CVS access to the KDE source code and will be making the KDE source be able to build .deb's out of the box with no modifications. Of course, KDE remains out of Debian due to the license issues.
New packages added to Debian this week include the following and 17 more:
- gnujsp: A free implementation of Sun's Java Server Pages
- libxml-parser-perl:A Perl extension interface to James Clark's XML parser
- nvi-m17n: Multilingualized nvi ( with Canna, and common files)
- openldap-gateways: OpenLDAP Gateways
- systune: Kernel tuning through the /proc filesystem
Server news:
- The long-awaited new non-US master server, pandora.debian.org, is up and running and non-us.debian.org will soon point to it in the DNS. The new machine will end the problems we've been having with non-us for a long time. Perhaps the most important change is that non-us is now split into main, contrib, and non-free just like the rest of Debian. All developers have accounts on the new machine. Any uploads made to non-us in the past month need to be redone.
- Ben Collins and Ward Deng have set up a sparc build daemon on xia01, which started work this week.
Thanks to Randolph Chung and Christian Meder for contributing.
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This issue of Debian Weekly News was edited by Joey Hess.