Debian Weekly News - June 15th, 2004

Welcome to this year's 24th issue of DWN, the weekly newsletter for the Debian community. Tom Adelstein wrote about GNU/Linux on the desktop and concluded that it can help enterprises, especially those short of resources like city governments.

Status of the AMD64 Port. Chris Cheney asserted that "the" AMD64 port of Debian is ready for inclusion in Debian unstable. The port is currently at 97 % compiled packages with most of the remaining packages failing to build on other architectures as well.

Updated Debian Flyers. Michael Banck is working on updating the general flyer for Debian. Even though it was written as a general flyer some bits should be updated to reflect sarge and other releases better.

Packaging Firefox 0.9. Eric Dorland wondered how to handle the next release candidate of Firefox. Since the release of sarge will happen soon, he doesn't want it to be left with a potentially buggy version. Anthony Towns suggested that he uploads the new version of Firefox to experimental as soon as possible in order to see if it works as expected. When it doesn't cause problems, it can be moved to unstable without much hassle.

License for Documentation? Matthieu Delahaye wondered which license an upstream project should use for their documentation. The author wrote a consistent manual for this software which is not (yet) compliant with the Debian Free Software Guidelines (DFSG). Walter Landry proposed to simply stick to the license of the program and don't use a different license for the documentation.

Cyclic Build Dependencies. Jeroen van Wolffelaar noticed that oaklisp contains a binary file which is used for bootstrapping. There are at least half a dozen such loops in Debian already. Edmund Grimley Evans assumed that such cyclic build dependencies are acceptable in Debian.

Mozilla Public License. Jim Marhaus noticed that the new Mozilla license 1.1 is not compliant with the DFSG. He also phrased a draft summary. This mainly affects Mozilla itself, since the other packages (Firebird, OpenH323, Bugzilla etc.) are not yet relicensed under the new license.

Debian Kernel Maintenance. Christoph Hellwig compiled a short todo list for sarge kernels and wondered if more architectures besides i386, powerpc and ia64 are working on Linux 2.6. Martin Michlmayr added a list of housekeeping issues that have to be dealt with. William Lee Irwin II contributed the current blacklist of tainted files that need to be sanitised and/or removed from the kernel.

Security Updates. You know the drill. Please make sure that you update your systems if you have any of these packages installed.

New or Noteworthy Packages. The following packages were added to the unstable Debian archive recently or contain important updates.

Debian Packages introduced last Week. Every day, a different Debian package is featured from the testing distribution. If you know about an obscure package you think others should also know about, send it to Andrew Sweger. Debian package a day introduced the following packages last week.

Orphaned Packages. 19 packages were orphaned this week and require a new maintainer. This makes a total of 184 orphaned packages. Many thanks to the previous maintainers who contributed to the Free Software community. Please see the WNPP pages for the full list, and please add a note to the bug report and retitle it to ITA: if you plan to take over a package.

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This issue of Debian Weekly News was edited by Martin 'Joey' Schulze.