Debian Weekly News - June 21st, 2005

Welcome to this year's 25th issue of DWN, the weekly newsletter for the Debian community. Jordi Mallach reported that the GNOME team has completed all uploads needed to bring GNOME 2.10.1 into unstable. With the presence at this year's LinuxTag and the first sarge DVD after the release this will become a hectic week for European Debian people.

Woody to Sarge Upgrades. Bill Allombert summarised the major problems people have reported in upgrade reports. Circular dependencies in woody and the dependency of apt-get and aptitude on C++ seem to be the most problematic ones. There are far too many packages that alter configuration files for which dpkg requires approval before overwriting them.

The Debian Legacy. Nick Myra reported about the sarge release and that Debian's popularity has inspired dozens of variants, many of them run directly from CD. Knoppix and its derivatives have encouraged the current growth in GNU/Linux users. Debian helps show that GNU/Linux and its broader social, political, and economical implications are a force to be reckoned with.

SELinux and BSD Ports. Aurélien Jarno reported about problems for the BSD ports of Debian with the integration of SELinux support to regular packages. Since SELinux is Linux-specific these patches won't work on the BSD ports and the Hurd. He added a code snippet that adds proper support for libselinux1.

Menu System Update. Bill Allombert reported about improvements done in the menu package during the preparations of sarge on which packages may now depend. Translations of menu sections, different character sets and XDG menus are now supported. He also asked developers to let the menu item start with a capital letter and to move menu files to /usr/share in order to support the Filesystem Hierarchy Standard.

Debian in embedded Systems. The fifth annual market survey reported that Debian was the most popular distribution. The OpenEmbedded project appears to be a notable up-and-comer. It began as the OpenZaurus project, and then evolved into a cross-platform build system supporting a wide variety of embedded targets.

Debian Project on Tour. The Debian project announced its presence at the OSS Symposium for business and public administration in Ostfildern, Germany, at this year's LinuxTag and at the fifth Debian Conference in Helsinki, Finland. The finalised schedule of Debian related talks during LinuxTag contains archive descriptions, sub-projects, detailed use cases, porting and a lot more.

Javi's Etch Wishlist. Javier Fernández-Sanguino Peña outlined wishlist items for the next Debian release. The list contains several improvements into a more security hardened system, rollback mechanism for upgrades, an alternate boot system, the switch to xinetd, the need for better documentation, improved package search and tracking mechanisms and much more.

PostgreSQL Transition. Martin Pitt announced that the switch to a new architecture of PostgreSQL packages is being implemented now. The new structure is a lot easier to maintain and also offers many new features for users. All packages that formerly depended on postgresql-dev need to be altered and uploaded again.

Debian Mini Conference in Japan. Yukiharu Yabuki announced a mini Debian conference taking place on October in Osaka, Japan. He already organised a Debian birds of a feather session at the Kansai OpenSource conference. At least some talks will be given in English.

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

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