Debian Weekly News - October 6th, 1999
Welcome to Debian Weekly News, a newsletter for the Debian developer community. This is a very short issue of DWN; my apologies for not covering more of what's been happening.
A free version of ssh has been found. It turns out that an early version of the program was free software. OpenBSD has been working on updating that version, and it is hoped they have produced a usable substitute for the current, non-free ssh. If so, it will of course quickly be packaged for Debian.
It's been quite a week for crippling bugs in unstable.
- First was a package uploaded with a misspelled "Priority" control line. This seemingly minor mistake was not caught before the package was put on the ftp sites, and it made apt refuse to install anything at all. Though the problem was soon fixed, it left behind questions about why dinstall doesn't do checks to detect this type of problems, and why apt was so fragile. Apt at least, has been fixed so this won't happen again, and hopefully dinstall will be fixed as well.
- Next was a broken menu package that consumed all memory each time anything that used menu was installed. It also has been fixed, though it may be a day before the fix reaches all the mirrors.
Stephane Bortzmeyer posted a Debian SGML/XML HOWTO. "The HOWTO is task-oriented: you will see what Debian packages you will need for various tasks, and how to use them."
As usual, a new edition of Debian JP news is available.
New packages in Debian this week include the following 31 and 43 more:
- aleph: The Aleph programming language - runtime (dev, doc)
- apt-move: Move cache of Debian packages into a mirror hierarchy
- apt-zip: Update a non-networked computer using apt and a removable media
- expect: A program that "talks" to other programs. (dev)
- gamix: Another graphical mixer for ALSA (4 days new)
- geda-utils: GNU EDA -- Electronics design software -- utilities (symbol checker)
- Linux Kernel 2.2 (source, doc, headers, chrp, i386, pmac, prep, patch-i386, patch-powerpc, patch-sparc)
- libcqcam-dev: Color QuickCam (PC/Parallel) control library
- Netscape version 4.7 (base packages pull in what you need) (base, java, smotif bin, communicator-base, communicator online help, communication smotif bin, communicator spell check, navigator-base, navigator online help, navigator smotif bin)
Thanks to Randolph Chung and Katsura Yoshio for contributing.
To receive this newsletter weekly in your mailbox, subscribe to the debian-news mailing list.
Back issues of this newsletter are available.
This issue of Debian Weekly News was edited by Joey Hess.