Debian Weekly News - May 10th, 2005

Welcome to this year's 19th issue of DWN, the weekly newsletter for the Debian community. Shortly before the release a discussion on the version number for sarge arose. In light of the upcoming release of sarge, the debian-release list has seen a flood of requests to update packages in sarge which the release team are dealing with.

Sarge is frozen. Steve Langasek eventually announced the freeze of sarge. All updates need to be approved manually and should go in via unstable if possible. He explained which changes are still allowed to go into sarge and emphasised on only fixing critical bugs without other changes. If everything goes well, we'll be ready to release at the end of the month.

Debian Server in 3.1 Watts. Alex Perry installed Debian woody on a Peplink Manga. This unit combines an ARM based processor, two Ethernet interfaces, a four port switch, USB 2.0 and a power draw of 3 Watts (including the AC adaptor). He installed Debian on a 1 GB USB flash drive and explains step by step how it went.

Second Project Leader Report. Branden Robinson wrote his second report in which he reported about the sarge release progress, about three new ARM machines that have been added to the buildd network, upcoming hardware upgrades, about Debian assets and hardware donations, an interview and travel plans among other topics.

AMD64 Port Update. Jörg Jaspert announced that the AMD64 archive has been moved from Alioth to a dedicated server in order to decrease the load and disk usage on the old host. The system uses a copy of the Debian archive suite and has special tools added to keep their unofficial sarge distribution in sync with the Debian sarge distribution. CD images of the release will also be hosted on cdimage.debian.org.

License Incompatibilities. Christian Hammers reported about a problem with Quagga which is licensed under the GNU GPL but is supposed to be linked against NetSNMP. This poses a problem since NetSNMP depends on OpenSSL which is not GPL compatible.

APT Migration Status. Florian Weimer reported the status of the apt 0.6 migration into sid and maybe sarge. He has set up a public test suite so that interested users can test the behaviour of apt 0.6 with different test data. Matt Zimmerman added that uploading a new version even into experimental is non-trivial due to library dependencies.

Surveys in Debian. MJ Ray wrote a summary that describes recent surveys done with affiliation to the Debian project. It also include some pointers to advice on producing good surveys. Andrew Suffield added more cynical comments to it such as that surveys have to be treated with extreme scepticism.

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.

Orphaned Packages. 2 packages were orphaned this week and require a new maintainer. This makes a total of 219 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.

Removed Packages. 6 packages have been removed from the Debian archive during the past week:

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