Debian Weekly News - April 25th, 2006

Welcome to this year's 17th issue of DWN, the weekly newsletter for the Debian community. The Debian Live Initiative that aims to produce a pure Debian live CD summarises links to mailing lists, ISO images and other resources on their website. Aníbal Monsalve Salazar is soliciting ASCII armoured public keys for the keysigning party at the upcoming Debian Conference.

Using Alioth for Packaging. Raphaël Hertzog provided documentation on maintaining Debian packages via Alioth. For single packages the collab-maint project is probably sufficient. Maintaining a set of related packages is best done by a new dedicated project and Subversion configured to send commit notifications to the package tracking system.

Google Summer of Code 2006. Google is organising a Summer of Code event like last year. This is a program where Google sponsors the creation and future development of open source software. Petter Reinholdtsen asked whether Debian should participate and set up an Wiki page were ideas for Debian-related projects are collected. Anthony Towns approved this and applied for the Debian project.

Debian from Scratch. John Goerzen informed about the availability of a new release of the Debian From Scratch CD. With this CD it is possible to install a Debian system in a Gentoo fashioned manner by compiling the programs just before installing them. This CD also offers a fully functional rescue system with a lot of filesystem tools, backup and repair utilities, administrative tools and so on.

Upgrade Conflict: Kernel and GRUB. Bastian Blank pointed out anticipated problems with regards to the kernel and grub when upgrading from sarge to etch since the new kernel-package utilises debconf for user interaction. He asserted that grub needs to be updated before the kernel image.

Properly Closing old resolved Bug Reports. Adam Majer wondered if it is appropriate to close old resolved bugs with the most recent changelog entry if they were fixed with an older upload already. Matthew Palmer confirmed that a changelog entry should only document the changes and resolved bugs in this particular upload.

Removing Mozilla. Andreas Metzler reported that current release of Mozilla is the last and that it isn't supported upstream anymore. Hence, it should be removed from the Debian distribution as well. All functionality that is needed to embed gecko and friends has been moved to xulrunner on which these packages should depend upon. The interface shouldn't have changed, so that the conversion should be fairly simple.

Project Leader Bits. Anthony Towns reported that he has added Steve McIntyre as "Second In Charge" to share some of the regular project leader responsibilities. Manoj Srivastava has kindly agreed to continue as project secretary for another year, and is eager to do some more work on the devotee scripts.

AMD64 added to the Etch. Anthony Towns reported that the AMD64 architecture has been added to the etch release. It should be possible to bootstrap this architecture at this point and it only lacks X. From now on developers with AMD64 machines are able to upload new versions of their packages built locally. AMD64 is also now included in the buildd graphs.

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. 17 packages were orphaned this week and require a new maintainer. This makes a total of 302 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 Sebastian Feltel, Mohammed Adnène Trojette and Martin 'Joey' Schulze.