Debian Weekly News - August 17th, 1999

Welcome to the 31st issue of Debian Weekly News, a newsletter for the Debian developer community.

LinuxWorld Expo was the big event of the week. Debian received a Visitors' Choice award for Best Client Distribution. Debian was also a finalist in the Editors' Choice awards for Best Web Server, Best Mail Server and overall Best Server Distribution. Expo pictures are also available

Also at LinuxWorld Expo, Corel demonstrated their Corel Linux Distribution, based on Debian. It includes a graphical 4 question install process, and also has an apt frontend that uses QT, which can be seen here. Many people have criticized Debian for being difficult to install. Christopher W. Curtis started a discussion on how the Corel Debian installer can make things easier for the new user.

A warning to people upgrading from slink to potato: a dependency problem was discovered in the bash package that would cause bash to be removed from your system when you upgrade. A fixed bash package has already been uploaded.

Joey Hess proposed a major update to slink (Debian 2.1). Under the proposal, major packages that have been tested for 2-4 months will be incorporated into slink. Hopefully, this experiment will help cut down on Debian's future release cycles. Response so far as been largely positive, and work is underway.

Freeze watch: the latest BugScan report from Wichert Akkerman shows 208 release-critical bugs in potato. Several developers have carefully gone through the report and identified possible solutions for many of the bugs. A bug-squatter team is needed to fix remaining release critical bugs after the freeze. Please contact our release manager if you are willing to volunteer.

As usual, a summary of news from the Debian-JP project is available.

New packages added to Debian this week include the following 11 and 40 more:

This short issue of Debian Weekly News is edited by Randolph Chung, standing in for Joey Hess while he was hard-at-work at LinuxWorld Expo. Joey will be back next week.

Thanks to Joey Hess, and Katsura S. Yoshio for contributing.

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Back issues of this newsletter are available.

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