Debian Weekly News - November 15th, 2005

Welcome to this year's 46th issue of DWN, the weekly newsletter for the Debian community. Members of the Debian-Edu sub-project have proposed codenames for the upcoming Skolelinux release such as Terra, Tellus and Oslo. Adrian von Bidder was looking for very old Debian installation images. Many can still be found on ibiblio.org.

Status of Big Endian ARM Port. Lennert Buytenhek reported that the big endian ARM port has seen steady progress in the recent weeks. The sarge distribution is nearly rebuilt and two build daemons are working on the unstable distribution, both of which are available from a separate server.

Travel Sponsorship for Debian Conference. Andreas Schuldei offered active Debian people limited travel sponsorship if they can't afford the entire trip. In order to be able to plan the budget he asked those to register in time. A committee will later decide about the sponsoring options.

Oldenburg DevJam Meeting Report. Arnaud Vandyck reported that several Java people from different distributions have met at the DevJam for the first time. Developers from different distributions and upstream packages have discussed the state and development of the free Java toolchain.

Automatic Clam AntiVirus Database Updates. Marc Haber announced that a script checks every 30 minutes if new virus patterns have been released and rebuilds the virus database for Clam AntiVirus on the volatile host if necessary. If all tests are passed automatically packages will be moved into the volatile archive. Older packages are automatically removed.

Debian-Installer Etch Beta 1. Joey Hess announced the first etch beta release of the debian-installer and explained why the release took so long. The most time-consuming problem was chasing recently introduced bugs in various packages the installer depends on. Daily building installer images only rarely result in working images, which needs to be improved.

Mozilla Public License 1.1. Fathi Boudra sought cover for the SugarCRM license which is based on the Mozilla Public License 1.1 (MPL). Matthew Garrett reported that various people believe that the MPL alone is non-free, however, Mozilla is being relicensed under the GNU GPL and, hence, stays in the main archive.

FOSDEM: Call for Talks. Wouter Verhelst called for talks for the Debian room at the upcoming FOSDEM conference that will take place on February 25th and 26th, 2006 in Brussels, Belgium. The talks should cover a technical issue and aimed towards people familiar with the Debian project.

License for Debian Conference Material. Francesco Poli stated that DebConf speakers should be required to publish their paper under a license compatible with the DFSG. Anthony Towns pointed out that Debian already distributes lots of content that isn't DFSG-free, such as mailing lists and bug reports.

October Debian-Installer Meeting. Christian Perrier published the minutes of the sixth Debian-Installer team meeting held in October. The progress on the GTK installer has been amazing and all attendees agreed to make it available as soon as possible. Switching to udev became a major goal for the future.

Development Package Dependencies. Gabor Gombas noticed problems in dependencies of development packages since linking statically and dynamically requires different packages and because some packages conflict with each other since they provide the same files. Russ Allbery explained that the include file path is part of the programming interface of the Kerberos implementation.

Maintaining Basic Network Utilities. Noah Meyerhans wondered how to best continue maintaining the iputils package that provides basic network utilities such as ping since the pristine package is Linux-specific and doesn't compile or work on the Hurd or kFreeBSD port of Debian. An official fork may lead in the proper direction but could imply that new kernel features may not be supported immediately.

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. 1 package was orphaned this week and requires a new maintainer. This makes a total of 204 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.