Debian Weekly News - March 7th, 2000
Welcome to Debian Weekly News, a newsletter for the Debian developer community. This is a combined 2 week summary.
We've now passed the first Release Critical Bug Horizon, and 20 packages will soon be removed from potato. The bug horizon has been a success, based on the number of release critical bugs that have been closed in the past 2 weeks -- for a while less than 200 were open, down from 300+ a few weeks ago -- fewer RC bugs than any time since last summer. The number of bugs is on the rise again though, and another bug horizon may be called.
Project leader elections close in just a few days. Do remember to vote. Linux.com has posted interviews with Wichert Akkerman and Matthew Vernon. Joel Klecker was not interviewed, but he did make a brief statement.
Two new ways to show people Debian in action:
- Install Debian wherever you go with the latest version of LinuxCare's Bootable Business Card which allows installation of the Debian base system, right off the mini-CD.
- Compaq's testdrive program now includes accounts on i386 and alpha Debian systems.
Ddiff was announced. Ddiff is a tool to generate binary diffs between different versions of .deb packages.
Two security problems were fixed this week. Fixes are available for remote exploits of the nmh and htdig packages in slink. There was discussion of a man exploit on bugtraq, but Debian uses a different man package and is not vulnerable. Similarly, bugtraq discussion indicates we aren't vulnerable to the dosemu problems present in Corel Linux.
New packages in Debian this week include the following and 19 more:
- corewars: The classic corewars game with gtk-look
- dhis: Dynamic Host Information System client (server)
- libsdl-mixer1.0: mixer library for Simple DirectMedia Layer (dev)
- libvds-dev: The view-dependent simplification library
- unison: A file-synchronization tool for Unix and Windows
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This issue of Debian Weekly News was edited by Joey Hess.