Debian Weekly News - May 6th, 2001

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

First - a new editor team for DWN. Joey Hess was tired, but a couple of people thought it would be a shame if DWN were to die, so we asked if we might take over, and he let us. The lucky ones are Jean-Christophe Helary, Joe 'Zonker' Brockmeier and Tollef Fog Heen. Joey wants to thank the hundreds of people who sent in mails of encouragement and thanks, and wishes the new DWN staff well.

Since the last issue, 2.2r3 is out. It fixes quite a few security and release critical bugs: an ntp root exploit, and samba symlink problems are among those. Some of the security updates were incorrectly built on an unstable system, which caused some confusion. This is fixed now.

The boot floppies are coming along, albeit slowly. There have been some troubles relating to slang and utf8, but those should be mostly worked out now. The boot-floppies have been translated into Danish, and we have a Gaelic translation underway. Also, if we are to release Woody this year, the boot-floppies need much more help.

Ben Collins has already begun his work as Project Leader. So far, he is beefing up the technical committee, and both Bdale Garbee and Wichert Akkerman have been added to it.

On debian-devel, it has been a very busy week with long and heated discussions about whether ALL: PARANOID is a good setting to have in /etc/hosts.deny. Also there has been some discussion related to chroot'ing BIND. The biggest discussion is still 'kernel-{image,headers} package bloat' where Herbert Xu, Craig Sanders and Daniel Stone (and some other people) are flaming each other. Don't enter without your asbestos suit.

To CSS or not to CSS. Should packages like xine-dvd-css go into main? None of the ftp-masters want to be the one responsible for putting it in, so what will happen is still open to discussion (and legal advice). Related to this is the continuous crypto-in-main-discussion. Hopefully, this will be resolved with a little lawyer's help.

dpkg 1.9 is out. It fixes a lot of segfaults and adds support for signed packages. Also, it has new features, speedups, updated translations, fixes for Hurd, HPPA, IA64 and SH. There are already a couple of bugfix releases available, which fix some of the new and exciting bugs.

Some of the new packages which have made it into Debian this week are: cocoon2, thttpd, nvclock and task-harden

Feedback is always appreciated


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 Joe 'Zonker' Brockmeier, Jean-Christophe Helary and Tollef Fog Heen.