Debian Weekly News - November 29th, 2005

Welcome to this year's 48th issue of DWN, the weekly newsletter for the Debian community. Andreas Schuldei sent out a reminder for the DebConf call for papers. Martin Krafft announced a bug squashing party that lasts until December 14th and rewards 25 bug squashers with a book.

Possible Freetype Library Transition. Steve Langasek reported that libfreetype probably requires a transition as well due to upstream changes. There are currently 583 packages in unstable which depend on the libfreetype library, which would result in the largest transition. He asked library maintainers to improve their packages by using libtool and pkg-config.

Improved binary NMU Handling. Goswin Brederlow announced a new behaviour of the archive suite for binary non-maintainer uploads (NMUs). A build daemon can thus be told to rebuild a package as a binary NMU automatically. They will use a new version scheme and mark such uploads by adding +b1 (+b2, +b3) to the old version. Manual binary NMUs should best be prepared with the CVS version of sbuild.

Configuration File Handling. Frank Küster wondered if a failing postinst script because of changes to a configuration file that were not accepted by the local admin is considered a bug, especially if this causes an upgrade to be aborted. Petter Reinholdtsen suggested to implement a multilevel configuration system where local information are stored in a separate file.

Versioned Dependencies. Peter van Eynde wondered how he could get rid of a fatal versioned dependency to an architecture independent package. This causes the build daemon to fail building a newer version. Florian Weimer proposed to bootstrap the package manually on all supported architectures.

Virtual Servers with Debian Sarge. BJ Dierkes wrote a detailed description about the use of Debian 3.1 as a base for several kernel-based virtual servers. This requires to build a custom kernel with a special vserver patch applied. When the virtual server is created a new distribution has to be bootstrapped inside.

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. 5 packages were orphaned this week and require a new maintainer. This makes a total of 187 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.