Debian Weekly News - March 28th, 2006

Welcome to this year's 13th issue of DWN, the weekly newsletter for the Debian community. David Moreno Garza built an RSS feed for the Debian Weekly News. Manoj Srivastava called for votes for this year's project leader election which has seen the lowest participation ever in a Debian project leader election seen so far. Votes must be received by April 8th, 2006.

Deprecating debmake after etch. Santiago Vila announced that debmake will be removed from testing and unstable some time after the release of etch. Maintainers of the remaining packages (less than 60) that still use debmake for packaging should switch to other tools soon. In a few months he will open bug reports against the remaining packages.

Past Events Notes. Alexander Schmehl reported about past events where the Debian project was present. There were booths and participation at the FOSDEM in Belgium, the Chemnitzer Linux-Tage and the CeBIT in Hannover. Alexander also seeks for support for upcoming events like the South Pacific Linux World in Australia or the LinuxWorld Conference & Expo in Korea.

New Debian-Edu/Skolelinux Release. Finn-Arne Johansen announced the new version 2.0 of Skolelinux after a long period of development. It contains many updates and new features such as sound on thin clients, improved hardware detection, a new version of KDE and many updated translations for an increasing number of languages. A lot of documentation has also been improved to provide a better overview about the project and make it easier to join the team.

Limitations of reportbug. Kamaraju Kusumanchi reported that the reportbug utility has displayed more than 600 bug report titles when he wanted to report a bug. Since searching for keywords in bug reports is not supported Marco d'Itri suggested using Google groups for this.

Debian Fonts Task Force. Christian Perrier explained the goals of the foundation of a font packages maintenance team for Debian. One of the goals for this team is setting up a font packaging policy to improve the incorporation of new fonts in Debian. A dedicated project was set up on Alioth along with a Subversion repository and a mailing list.

Supported Languages for the Debian-Installer. Just after the second beta release of the debian-installer, Christian Perrier indicated that work was going on for the installer localisation. He cleaned out his debian-installer supported languages list. New languages are still being added but if people want their language to be supported in etch's installer, work must start now.

Archive Recompilation with GCC 4.1. Martin Michlmayr announced that over the last two weeks he has compiled the whole Debian archive on a quad-core Broadcom MIPS box using GCC 4.1. The aim was to discover problems in GCC 4.1 itself and bugs in packages exhibited by GCC's increased standards conformance (in particular regarding C++ code). Through the compilation of about 6200 packages, he found 500 new bugs: 280 of which are due to the increased strictness of GCC 4.1.

Writing Copyright Files. Jörg Jaspert reported about the requirements of information in copyright files since many rejects from the NEW queue are still due to broken or incomplete copyright-files. It must contain the author(s) name, the year(s) of the copyright, the used license(s) and the URL to the upstream source.

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. 13 packages were orphaned this week and require a new maintainer. This makes a total of 273 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. 25 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 Sebastian Feltel, Maximilian Wilhelm, Mohammed Adnène Trojette, Martin Michlmayr and Martin 'Joey' Schulze.