Debian Weekly News - October 4th, 2005
Welcome to this year's 40th issue of DWN, the weekly newsletter for the Debian community. Donald Feinberg, vice-president of Gartner predicted the end of Unix in 10-15 years and the rise of GNU/Linux. Debian GNU/Linux is used as a server running several open source products for analytics at the Australian Taxation Office.
DPL Team Status Issue Tracker. Andreas Schuldei announced a Wiki page in order to maintain transparency of the scud team since they did not have formal meetings and minutes for a longer time. The list includes funding, hardware and hosting requests, communications issues and more.
Release Team Changes. Colin Watson announced his resignation from the release team due to his time constraints. To let the release team benefit from his experience, he's going to stay in the team but merely as an engineer. A new release manager will be added to the team soon in order to fill the gap.
Work Needed and Prospective Packages. David Moreno Garza reported that in total 979 wnpp bugs have been closed in several investigation runs. Requests for packages and intentions to submit packages that are older than a year and haven't seen any significant activity were removed by this action. He will repeat this process automatically in the future.
Debian Network Introduction. Steve Kemp wrote a basic introduction into the network setup with Debian GNU/Linux. The article includes setting the hostname and IP address, setting up DNS, gives a short introduction into routing and explains hostname lookup.
New teTeX 3.0 Packages for Debian. Frank Küster announced that a new major version of teTeX will be uploaded to unstable when library transitions are allowed again. He asked developers of packages that maintain a connection to teTeX to test these with the new version of teTeX in order to avoid problems later.
Debian Meeting Archive. Holger Levsen announced a permanent Debian meeting archive that contains audio and video files as well as slides and example codes from various real-life Debian meetings. It currently hosts videos and slides from the Debian QA meeting in Darmstadt, videos from this year's Debian conference in Helsinki and slides from the Debian Day at this year's LinuxTag in Karlsruhe.
Resume from the Darmstadt QA Team Meeting. Andreas Barth reported about the productive meeting of the QA team in Darmstadt, Germany. Major results include the removal of very old and unused packages. There have also been discussions about how to support external contributors and how to make packages more independent of each other by using plugins with stable interfaces.
Dropping non-SMP Kernels for IA64? Dann Frazier wondered if kernel images for IA64 machines without symmetric multi processing (SMP) could be dropped from the distribution. He asserted that all current IA64 machines on the market are capable of SMP. Supporting such flavours is difficult because such configurations don't seem to get much attention upstream.
Planet Debian versus Mailing Lists. Wolfgang Borgert wondered how to filter important Debian development information from Planet Debian. Margarita Manterola asserted that it is part of the essence of blogging to state ones opinion and not be easily flamed for it like on a mailing list. She also agreed that sharing important development information should be done on the lists.
Future of the S/390 Port. Gerhard Tonn reported that he won't be able to work on the S/390 port anymore and is looking for a successor, who is willing to take over the administration of the buildd servers, analysing build failures and work on the requalification of this port for the etch release. Bastian Blank stated his willingness to take over the port.
Special Input Event Device Files. Frank Lichtenheld wondered
how pbbuttonsd should handle more than four event device
files that are automatically created by makedev. Marco d'Itri suggested to just educate the user if they are not using udev already. Christoph Hellwig,
though, stated that makedev
should just create all 32 device nodes.
Security Updates. You know the drill. Please make sure that you update your systems if you have any of these packages installed.
- DSA 821: python2.3 -- Arbitrary code execution.
- DSA 822: gtkdiskfree -- Insecure temporary file.
- DSA 823: util-linux -- Privilege escalation.
- DSA 824: clamav -- Denial of service.
- DSA 825: loop-aes-utils -- Privilege escalation.
- DSA 826: helix-player -- Multiple vulnerabilities.
- DSA 827: backupninja -- Insecure temporary file.
- DSA 828: squid -- Denial of service.
- DSA 829: mysql -- Arbitrary code execution.
- DSA 830: ntlmaps -- Information leak.
- DSA 831: mysql-dfsg -- Arbitrary code execution.
- DSA 832: gopher -- Several buffer overflows.
- DSA 833: mysql-dfsg-4.1 -- Arbitrary code execution.
- DSA 834: prozilla -- Arbitrary code execution.
- DSA 835: cfengine -- Arbitrary file overwriting.
- DSA 836: cfengine2 -- Arbitrary file overwriting.
- DSA 837: mozilla-firefox -- Denial of service.
- DSA 838: mozilla-firefox -- Multiple vulnerabilities.
- DSA 839: apachetop -- Insecure temporary file.
- DSA 840: drupal -- Remote command execution.
- DSA 841: mailutils -- Arbitrary code execution.
- DSA 842: egroupware -- Arbitrary code execution.
New or Noteworthy Packages. The following packages were added to the unstable Debian archive recently or contain important updates.
- acpitool -- Small, convenient command-line ACPI client.
- avce00 -- Tools for conversion of ESRI Arcinfo (binary) Vector Coverage in E00 format.
- calcurse -- Text-based calendar.
- cbrpager -- Viewer for CBR and CBZ (comic book archive) files.
- choosewm -- fake x-session-manager allowing the user to choose a wm.
- clex -- Command line file manager which uses the ncurses library.
- cm-super -- TeX font package with CM (EC) in Type1 in T1, T2*, TS1, X2 enc.
- e00compr -- Read and write Arc/Info compressed E00 files.
- gnunit -- Frontend for running NUnit 2 test suites.
- gyrus -- GNOME tool for Cyrus-IMAP servers administration.
- hdaps-utils -- HDAPS (IBM Hard Drive Active Protection System) utilities.
- initramfs-tools -- Tools for generating an initramfs.
- kannel-dev -- WAP and SMS gateway headers and development files.
- jta -- Java telnet/ssh applet.
- karrigell -- Python web server application framework.
- lprof -- Hardware Color Profiler.
- med-practice -- Debian-Med packages for practice management.
- mrtg-rrd -- The script for generating graphs for MRTG statistics.
- nadoka -- IRC logger, monitor and proxy program ("bot") in Ruby.
- nunit -- Unit test framework for .NET.
- owl-dms -- Intranet Knowledgebase or DMS.
- patchage -- Modular patch bay for Jack audio and Alsa Midi.
- pylize -- On-Screen presentation generation tool.
- qbankmanager -- Online banking program with graphical interface.
- ree -- Extract ROM extensions.
- rhapsody -- Small and efficient ncurses based IRC client.
- slgdbm -- Access to GDBM databases from S-Lang.
- webxml -- Simple form-based generator/editor of Tomcat's web.xml files.
- xfmedia -- Xfce media player.
- yasm -- Modular assembler with multiple syntaxes support.
Orphaned Packages. 6 packages were orphaned this week and require a new maintainer. This makes a total of 191 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.
- gal -- G App Libs. (Bug#331112)
- gbatnav -- Networked BattleShip game. (Bug#330167)
- icemc -- Editor for IceWM menus. (Bug#330469)
- nbio -- Nonblocking I/O for Java, Version 2. (Bug#330423)
- python-gnome -- PyGNOME -- Python bindings for GNOME. (Bug#330681)
- squashfs -- Tool to create and append to squashfs filesystems. (Bug#330525)
Removed Packages. 33 packages have been removed from the Debian archive during the past two weeks:
- xlispstat -- LISP-based environment for statistical computing
Bug#328798: Request of maintainer, old, superseded by R - esh -- The easy shell
Bug#328802: Request of maintainer, old, unused - libcdb-file-perl -- Perl interface to Dan Bernstein's cdb package.
Bug#328806: Request of maintainer, old, superseded - debian-history-ko -- Short history of the Debian project translated to Korean
Bug#328814: Request of maintainer, content put into other package - titrax -- Program to keep track of time.
Bug#328837: Request of maintainer, old, superseded - saxon-catalog -- Catalog support and wrapper for the Saxon XSLT processor
Bug#328847: Request of maintainer, old, superseded by libxml-commons-resolver1.1-java - ultrapoint -- GGI based presentation tool
Bug#328863: Request of maintainer, old, unused, upstream-dead - imcom -- Console jabber client
Bug#329003: Request of maintainer, buggy; replacements exist (cabber, centericq, or even bitlbee) - irmp3 -- Multimedia audio jukebox application.
Bug#327629: Request of QA, old, unused, rc-buggy, not in last stable release - gnome-commander -- File manager for GNOME
Bug#327634: Request of QA, old, unused, rc-buggy, superseded, depends on Gtk1.2 - bl -- Blink Keyboard LEDs.
Bug#327644: Request of QA, old, unused, rc-buggy - radiusd-cistron -- Radius server written by Cistron.
Bug#327645: Request of QA, old, unused, rc-buggy, many alternatives available - aspectj-anttasks -- Set of ant tasks for integrating aspectj into the compile.
Bug#327653: Request of QA, Has never been part of a stable release, old, unused, rc-buggy - avalon-excalibur -- Collection of reusable components for threading and datasource.
Bug#327656: Request of QA, old, unused, rc-buggy - jmeter -- Measure server application performance
Bug#327670: Request of QA, old, unused, rc-buggy, has never been part of a stable release - lids-2.4 -- LIDS kernel patch
Bug#327658: Request of QA, old, unused, kernel-patch doesn't apply, rc-buggy, has never been part of a stable release - doc-debian-ja -- Debian FAQ and other documents (Japanese)
Bug#327663: Request of QA, old, unused, obsolete - framerd -- Scalable knowledge base development and application platform
Bug#327666: Request of QA, old, unused, rc-buggy - hptalx -- HP48 or HP49 <-> Computer communications program for Linux
Bug#327668: Request of QA, old, unused, rc-buggy - gwydion-dylan-sgml -- Gwydion Dylan Documentation (HTML)
Bug#327669: Request of QA, old, unused, rc-buggy, has never been part of a stable release - mozilla-locale-zh-hk -- Mozilla Traditional Chinese (Hong Kong) language/region pack
Bug#327673: Request of QA, out-of-date, unused, uninstallable, has never been part of a stable release - koth -- King of the Hill - multiplayer, networked artillery game
Bug#327674: Request of QA, old, unused, rc-buggy - flin -- Menuing system with fvwm-like syntax
Bug#227777: Request of QA, old, unused, orphaned for a long time - goats -- Sticky-note type program for GNOME 2
Bug#290920: Request of QA, obsolete - cryptofs -- Transparent filesystem encryption plugin
Bug#323128: Request of maintainer, Superseded by encfs - mindterm -- Java SSH client that can be used as a web applet
Bug#323802: Request of QA, obsolete, buggy - rhdb-admin -- Graphical tool to administer PostgreSQL/RHDB Databases
Bug#327775: Request of QA, dead upstream, RC bugs - hunit -- Haskell Unit Testing Framework, GHC 6 libraries
Bug#329410: Request of maintainer, integrated into Haskell base libraries - libassetml -- Share image, sounds and video assets with other projects
Bug#329685: Request of maintainer, deprecated upstream; unused - mkdecbootcd -- Tool for making CDs bootable on DECstations
Bug#329763: Request of maintainer, superseded by delo - python-popy -- Empty package moving default python-popy package to python2.3
Bug#330210: Request of maintainer, dead upstream; alternatives exist - sylpheed-claws-vcalendar-plugin -- vCalendar message handling plugin for Sylpheed Claws
Bug#330368: Request of maintainer, dead upstream; superseded by Gtk2 version - gal2 -- G App Libs (run time library)
Bug#328734: Request of maintainer, superseded by newer versions
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This issue of Debian Weekly News was edited by Martin Zobel-Helas and Martin 'Joey' Schulze.