Debian Weekly News - December 6th, 2005
Welcome to this year's 49th issue of DWN, the weekly newsletter for the Debian community. Roland Stigge planned to file bugs against packages that provide no pristine source package, but are not native Debian packages either. Andreas Barth announced that the LDAP gateway to the bug tracking system has been moved to a new host with a configurable address.
General Resolution: Opening the Archive. Manoj Srivastava announced the discussion period for the general resolution about the Declassification of debian-private list archives. Anthony Towns has proposed this resolution in accordance with principles of openness and transparency to declassify and publish posts of historical or ongoing significance made to the private mailing list.
Final Debian Conference 5 Report. Fabian Fagerholm announced the final report about this year's Debian Conference in Helsinki. The document is intended for those who attended the conference and the general public. It includes impressions and facts from the conference. A more detailed financial report will be available later.
Temporary Directories per User? Noah Meyerhans reported
about a discussion within the security team to push the use of per-user
temporary directories as default. With proper code this is only a question of
an adjusted PAM configuration. However, some programs hardcode the
/tmp
directory.
C++ Transition Status Update. Nathanael Nerode reported about the transition of C++ libraries due to the use of a different memory allocator in the standard C++ library. Two libraries are still linked to an older library version and can be ignored, five packages still need to be transitioned regularly, five other packages haven't been built on all architectures yet and a large number of libraries still need to be transitioned.
Device Nodes with udev. Miles Bader noticed
that several old-style device nodes were created after booting a Debian kernel
with udev also installed. Marco
d'Itri explained that they result from the kernel configuration. However their
creation can easily be prevented with a proper configuration file for
udev
.
New Kernel Package. Manoj Srivastava announced new features in the new kernel-package package which has undergone a major restructuring. Ramdisk generation has been improved and can now be controlled via a configuration variable. The kernel image maintainer scripts now use debconf and the post-installation script has become less verbose by that.
Determining the intended Debian Version. Christopher Crammond wondered if there is a way to determine which version of Debian a given package belongs to. Marc Brockschmidt explained that almost all packages in stable have been uploaded to unstable before, were migrated to testing and then were released as stable.
Dropping Kerberos 4 Packages? Andreas Barth noticed that the krb4 packages accumulate several release-critical bugs that are difficult to fix and that their upstream doesn't seem to be active anymore. Russ Allbery added that MIT Kerberos is also going to drop Kerberos v4 support as of May of 2006.
Dropping Support for GCC 2.95? Thiemo Seufer wondered how many users GCC 2.95 still has. Since only 9 packages declare build dependencies on it, he proposed to remove this compiler version from etch before its release.
Security Updates. You know the drill. Please make sure that you update your systems if you have any of these packages installed.
- DSA 912: centericq -- Denial of service.
- DSA 913: gdk-pixbuf -- Several vulnerabilities.
- DSA 914: horde2 -- Cross-site scripting.
- DSA 915: helix-player -- Arbitrary code execution.
New or Noteworthy Packages. The following packages were added to the unstable Debian archive recently or contain important updates.
- culmus-fancy -- Type1 Fancy Hebrew Fonts for X11.
- eclipse -- Extensible Tool Platform and Java IDE.
- gdhcpd -- GTK+ configuration tool for dhcpd3-server.
- gproftpd -- GTK+ configuration tool for proftpd.
- irmp3 -- Multimedia Audio Jukebox application.
- kalgebra -- Calculator based on the MathML language.
- linuxdcpp -- Linux port of the famous dc++ client.
- mazeofgalious -- Maze of Galious.
- remctl-client -- Client for Kerberos-authenticated command execution.
- remctl-server -- Server for Kerberos-authenticated command execution.
- uim-qt -- Qt 4.x immodule for uim.
Orphaned Packages. 4 packages were orphaned this week and require a new maintainer. This makes a total of 192 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.
- cpbk -- Mirroring utility for backing up your files. (Bug#341724)
- elvis -- Powerful clone of the vi/ex text editor. (Bug#341821)
- procmeter -- X based system status monitor, older version. (Bug#341505)
- qps -- Qt based process status. (Bug#341907)
Removed Packages. 24 packages have been removed from the Debian archive during the past week:
- macrosystem -- Text file template system for C++
Bug#263871: Request of QA, orphaned, RC bug, no upstream - regexx -- C++ wrapper to the GNU regex functions
Bug#263873: Request of QA, orphaned, RC bug, no upstream - zope-callprofiler -- Profile your Zope website
Bug#310675: Request of maintainer, outdated, not many users - zope-cmfpgforum -- CMFpgForum is a CMF forum that uses a PostgreSQL database
Bug#310676: Request of maintainer, outdated, not many users - zope-dtmlcalendar -- Calendar DTML Tag - Zope
Bug#310677: Request of maintainer, outdated, not many users - zope-kinterbasdbda -- Zope Database Adapter for Interbase/Firebird
Bug#310680: Request of maintainer, outdated, not many users - zope-lockablefolder -- Variant of the standard Folder that can restrict access to its contents
Bug#310681: Request of maintainer, outdated, not many users - zope-cmfldap -- Zope CMF LDAP membership management tools
Bug#312854: Request of maintainer, outdated, not many users - zope-ldapuserfolder -- Zope LDAP user folder
Bug#312855: Request of maintainer, outdated, not many users - zope-cmfworkflow -- Zope CMF workflow module
Bug#312856: Request of maintainer, outdated, not many users - zope-parsedxml -- ParsedXML Zope Product
Bug#312857: Request of maintainer, outdated, not many users - zope-emarket -- Simple e-commerce system for Zope
Bug#312858: Request of maintainer, outdated, not many users - zope-ldap -- Driver for connecting Zope with LDAP system
Bug#312860: Request of maintainer, outdated, not many users - zope-cmf -- Zope Content Management Framework (CMF)
Bug#312861: Request of maintainer, outdated, not many users - zope-znavigator -- Zope product for creating navigation bars
Bug#312862: Request of maintainer, outdated, not many users - zope-xmlmethods -- XMLMethods Zope Product
Bug#312863: Request of maintainer, outdated, not many users - zopectl -- Zope instances controlling utility
Bug#312865: Request of maintainer, outdated, not many users - zope-mysqlda -- Zope Database Adapter for MySQL
Bug#312877: Request of maintainer, outdated, not many users - xlander -- Lunar landing simulation for X
Bug#327672: Request of QA, orphaned, unplayable - kernel-patch-2.4.19-arm -- Diffs to the Linux kernel source 2.4.19 for ARM
Bug#340281: Request of maintainer, obsolete - zodb3.4 -- set of tools for using the Zope Object Database (ZODB)
Bug#340617: Request of maintainer, superseded by zodb - zope2.7-archetypes -- framework for developing and deploying new content types
Bug#340618: Request of maintainer, superseded by zope-archetypes - automake1.6 -- Tool for generating GNU Standards-compliant Makefiles.
Bug#340921: Request of maintainer, superseded by automake1.{7,8,9} - hitop -- High-level website description language
Bug#340700: Request of maintainer, old, unmaintained upstream
Want to continue reading DWN? Please help us create this newsletter. We still need more volunteer writers who watch the Debian community and report about what is going on. Please see the contributing page to find out how to help. We're looking forward to receiving your mail at dwn@debian.org.
To receive this newsletter weekly in your mailbox, subscribe to the debian-news mailing list.
Back issues of this newsletter are available.
This issue of Debian Weekly News was edited by Martin 'Joey' Schulze.