Debian Weekly News - May 23rd, 2000

Welcome to Debian Weekly News, a newsletter for the Debian developer community.

No Debian Weekly News was published last week because there was little to report on, except indecision about what to do about the first test cycle. The test cycle started slowly, and CD images were not available until this Monday. We have learned something from this test cycle though -- as Richard Braakman said, "The first test cycle flushed out some coordination problems" and "We hope that the next cycle will be a more thorough test of the distribution itself."

And in the meantime, it has become clear that we do need another test cycle. Boot-floppies team leader Adam Di Carlo wrote that "We need a release kernel, not a pre-release kernel. We need to fix some rather nasty problems in boot-floppies". And so Richard Braakman has called an end to the current test cycle today, with plans to start another one on the 29th. In preparation for that, he plans to "remove most of the packages that have release-critical bugs from potato" on the 25th and 26th. Read his message for other important details.

Here's an update on plans for the First Debian Conference in France, which is being held as part of the Libre Software Meeting. RMS will be there to talk about the HURD, and Wichert Akkerman will be there. The organizers hope to have several conferences plus coding parties where real work can be done. They are looking for speakers and also for sponsors. Also it's been proposed that this not be a one-time affair, but instead be an annual event that moves to a new country each year. If you are a developer who is interested in the conference, please fill out this short survey to let the organizers know what to expect.

Helix Code has released Debian packages of Helix Gnome. It sounds like they went all out to make these well behaved Debian packages: "We really want to do this right. In particular, we want all of our packages to be lintian clean. If you find a policy violation in a Helix GNOME package, it's a bug. "

Should packages that depend on packages in non-US/main be put in main, contrib, or non-US/main? Before non-US was split, the answer was "contrib". Now, though, what should be done is less clear. The most popular choice seems to be non-US/main, with various arguments being made for each of the choices.

In server news, ftp.debian.org has been upgraded and moved so it is connected directly to an international network backbone. When potato is finally released, we'll be ready ...

New packages in Debian this week include the following and 11 more:


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