Debian Weekly News - February 8th, 1999
Welcome to the sixth edition of Debian Weekly News, a newsletter for the Debian developer community.
Debian's new Project Leader is Wichert Akkerman. Election results here. Congratulations are in order for Wichert, but also thanks to Ian Jackson for guiding Debian through the past year, and thanks to all the other candidates who volunteered for such a demanding job.
Progress toward release continues: the number of release critical bugs is down to 22 as of today. For more up to date info, you can always check Wichert's report. Beta CD images of slink are also now available as well. Note that all of Debian takes up 4 CD's now.
A buffer overflow security hole that can lead to root access is present in proftpd and wu-ftpd. The proftpd package in frozen and unstable is already fixed, and fixed wu-ftpd-academ packages are in Incoming.
Slashdot is running a poll of favorite distributions, and Debian is currently in second place. Go vote.
Lars Wirzenius has written up an excellent list of lessons about project management we've learned developing Debian.
Christian Hammers proposed the idea of having a simple config file for networking setup, rather than the current /etc/init.d/network script. The idea was enthusiastically welcomed with lots of people coming forward with code and ideas. It looks like a small part of Debian is going to get easier to set up.
Gordan Matzigkeit, Roland McGrath, and grub's author, Erich Boleyn, had a very fruitful thread going about grub, the Hurd, and Debian. They discussed how to work together and features the Hurd project needs. In other Hurd news, emacs20 is now available.
Debhelper is now in use by 50% of the source packages in Debian. Here is a graph showing how Debhelper has grown in popularity over the years.
New packages added to Debian this week include:
- Many Window Maker dock apps, including pclock, wmcpu, wmdate, wmpinboard, wmspaceweather, wmsysmon, and wmweather.
- xtet42 has been added back into Debian. It was removed earlier because of copyright problems which are now fixed.
- x11amp, a fine X based mp3 player.
Server news
- www.debian.org had some trouble early in the week (or more accurately part of the network near to it did) and the site was difficult to reach. Of course, one of the many mirrors can always be used if you cannot connect to the main server.
Followups to previous news items:
- Coverage on slashdot of our hunt for a new logo can be found here and current submissions can be found here. There have been some complaints about the requirement that logos in the gimp contest "MUST be manipulated entirely in the GIMP". One problem with that is the gimp doesn't yet support vector graphics.
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This issue of Debian Weekly News was edited by Joey Hess.