Debian Weekly News - July 20th, 1999
Welcome to Debian Weekly News, a newsletter for the Debian developer community. I'm on vacation this week so this issue is a day late.
Is Bruce Back? Bruce Perens was interviewed in LinuxWorld and talks about Debian: "After a bad year, Debian has started going for users. It has a new project leader, Wichert Akkerman, and a deal with Corel, who will package a commercial version of Debian and KDE". And then he drops this bombshell: "Some of my old Debian packages need a maintainer, and I'll probably take them up again.".
The design specification for DpkgV2 has been released. It is a very modular design, and the most interesting feature is support for numerous different package formats. DpkgV2 is intended to be used mostly as a library from within other front end tools.
An interesting development from the Debian-JP project is a single floppy ftp server using Debian. For details and other news, see the Debian-JP news.
Linux Gazette posted an article about installing Debian via a PLIP link if you lack CD and ethernet. It sure beats 6 floppies..
Red Hat's recent offer to let members of the linux community buy shares of their stock before their IPO was sent to every developer on the Debian keyring. While some people view this offer and the way is was presented as akin to spam, others do appreciate it.
Local events:
- Philadelphia Area Debian Society (PADS) will meet on Wednesday to continue talking about Debian's policy. Chris Fearnley is speaking.
Server news for this week revolves around disk problems and fixes:
- Jason Gunthorpe from the debian-admin team reports that the Alpha and Sparc Debian development machines Faure, Kubrick and Albert are down due to a broken hard disk.
- The good news is that saens is now back online with a replacement for the disk that died three weeks ago, and ftp.debian.org will return to that server.
- Jason also posted a plea that "if there is any way to reduce the size of the web site, please do it now". The problem is we are running out of space on va because the list archives and BTS continue to grow in size every day. In response to that, list archives for 1996 and 1997 were removed from the web site (they are still available in mbox format).
Followups to last week's news:
- The question of how to handle the transition to the FHS's /usr/share/doc directory is still unresolved. Manoj has made a proposal that has received a lot of favorable attention, but several people still object to it.
- Kevin Lindsay and Atsushi Ikeda are equal co-contributors on the Storm linux team along with R Garth Wood, and we're told the team is growing.
Thanks to Katsura S. Yoshio and Christian Meder for contributing.
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This issue of Debian Weekly News was edited by Joey Hess.