Debian Weekly News - October 12th, 1999
Welcome to Debian Weekly News, a newsletter for the Debian developer community.
It's official: Debian is not currently accepting new members. Wichert Akkerman posted explaining the situation: "As you may have heard or even experienced yourself, Debian's new-maintainer team is currently not processing requests. The team wanted to resolve some problems they observed with the way Debian maintainership is current[ly] handled, and decided to close new-maintainer until these have been fixed." He also explained what is being done to rectify the situation: "We are currently working on a new structure for handling new-maintainer requests, and hope to have this finished as soon as possible. There will be a proposal on this posted on the debian-devel list in the near future. Once the new structure is in place new-maintainer will be reopened, and we will make an announcement."
Freeze watch: Debian is still scheduled to freeze on November first, just a few weeks away. Some work towards the release this week included:
- Boot-floppies for potato were just uploaded. Though this is an "early access Alpha version", it's very good news since it marks the first time potato has had boot floppies of any kind. It now takes one floppy more to install: the rescue disk has split into boot and root disks. Apt will be the only install method on the new floppies, and work has begun on an apt configurator to walk new users through setting up apt.
- Anthony Towns did some investigation to find how many packages currently in Debian are not installable because of unmet dependencies. His report lists reasonably low numbers, around 80 per architecture. The two ports we are not going to release with potato have significantly more problems.
Debian in a box should start appearing in stores soon. The boxed set includes the new O'Reilly Debian book. Read all about it on News.com, and in the New York Times. The whole O'Reilly book is also available online.
In an effort to reduce non-technical discussions on debian-devel, a debian-project mailing list has been created. It is an open list for organizational and if necessary, political discussions.
Debian booths are popping up at shows all over. Jules Bean posted a report of Debian's presence as Linux Expo in London. And here's a report of Debian's presence at the Pluto Meeting in Italy. Of course, Atlanta Linux Showcase is fast approaching, and lots of Debian people will be at our booth there.
As usual, here is the Debian JP news for this week.
New packages in Debian this week include the following and 41 more:
- obliq: An interactive interpreter for the Obliq language.
- pcmcia-modules-2.2.12 : PCMCIA Modules for Linux (kernel 2.2.12)
- powstatd: Configurable UPS monitoring daemon
- space-orbit: A 3D space combat simulator
Thanks to Randolph Chung and Katsura S. Yoshio for contributing. Randolph Chung will be filling in as guest editor next week while Joey Hess is at Atlanta Linux Showcase.
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This issue of Debian Weekly News was edited by Joey Hess.