Debian Weekly News - November 1st, 2005

Welcome to this year's 44th issue of DWN, the weekly newsletter for the Debian community. Nathanael Nerode reported that current GCC versions support the old i386 processor again and hence Debian could retain i386 compatibility in the upcoming etch release.

Calculating Development Package Dependencies. Jay Berkenbilt proposed to work on a debhelper script that helps calculating libtool dependencies for development packages. Goswin von Brederlow pointed out that with multiarch there may be concurrent .la files to handle. No consensus in favour of such a script was reached. Junichi Uekawa (上川 純一) mentioned the d-shlibs package that contains scripts to support the maintainer in this regard.

New OpenSSL Package. Christoph Martin has uploaded a new upstream version of OpenSSL and Aurelien Jarno provided a list of more than 300 packages that will have to be rebuilt. Jonas Meurer added maintainer names to it. Henrique Holschuh asked for versioned symbols for this library since it would cure the problem of linking against more than one version of the library.

Berlinux Event Report. Meike Reichle wrote a report about the Berlinux exhibition and conference that took place in Berlin, Germany at the end of last month. Members of the Debian project ran a booth and gave several talks that were directly or indirectly related to Debian. The booth featured a Debian controlled model railway from Frank Ronneburg and a Nokia 770 from Wolfgang Borgert.

Effort to alter RFC Licensing. Simon Josefsson started an effort to influence the IETF to change the copying conditions on RFCs to make them more Free Software friendly. He is looking for signatures from Free Software developers to support his proposed license change.

Automatic Building Kernel Modules. Russ Allbery wondered how to deal with a request against the openafs-modules-source to automatically build kernel modules when the kernel is updated. Building kernel modules separately from the source package is a very bad idea since they can't be easily updated by the security team. Andres Salomon added that the infrastructure for a package to build -source packages hasn't been implemented yet.

Automatic Test Suite Results Forwarding. Florian Ragwitz wondered how a package could emit the results of the test suite to the upstream developers. The test suite is run during the build stage of the package and is a helpful resource for the developers. Daniel Jacobowitz proposed to display the results during the build so they will end up in the build logs, which are publicly available.

GTK+ Icon Cache Discussion. Josselin Mouette is seeking input on handling icons caches in the GTK+ library since traversing the entire directory tree is time consuming. When the cache is not rebuilt for recently added icons, the corresponding programs can't start as usual.

Postinst Check for Package Status. Frank Küster wondered if there is an established method for the postinst script to determine the status of another package in order to prevent a second invocation of a time consuming program. He stated that the Zope packages already try to implement a general post-hook mechanism with APT. Ben Armstrong quoted a snippet from the libc6 postinst that solves the original problem.

GNOME Meta Package Dependencies. Arthur Edwards complained about the gnome meta package depending on the gnome-games package since in some government environments games are prohibited. Ben Armstrong noted that one doesn't benefit from future goodies if the meta package is removed, even though it is not essential.

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. 9 packages were orphaned this week and require a new maintainer. This makes a total of 206 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. 11 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 Martin 'Joey' Schulze.