Debian Weekly News - June 13th, 2006

Welcome to this year's 24th issue of DWN, the weekly newsletter for the Debian community. Jeff Licquia stated that the last tests he ran would have been acceptable for passing the Linux Standard Base 3.1. OSDir put up a screenshot tour of the second beta release of the installer for Debian etch.

Debian CGL registration. Troy Heber reported that Debian GNU/Linux 3.1 has been registered against OSDL's CGL 2.0.2 specification as a Carrier Grade Linux (CGL) distribution by HP. Since Debian does not meet the requirements with 100 % an analysis will show where it falls and help correct this for future releases. Ideally this would result in a fully integrated Custom Debian Distribution.

GNOME 1 Packages in Debian. Nathanael Nerode wondered what to do with the remaining GNOME 1 packages that are in the archive. With the new GnuCash based on GTK2 entering testing it is finally possible to minimise the number of these library packages that are no longer supported by upstream as they were only used by the old GnuCash version.

Graphical Reportbug. Philipp Kern reported that he is in the process of programming a graphical frontend to the reportbug tool. The goal is to give even inexperienced users the chance to report bugs and wishes to developers. Philipp's project is part of Debian's participation of this year's Summer of Code from Google.

Debian is not a SuperMarket. Joey Hess coined the term supermarket for Debian as a resource of packages when he was talking about fears that Debian could degrade into a collection of not well integrated software while many people use derivates that would simply use this pool. He explained that Debian is not only about packaging but also about integrating and making it the best distribution.

Valid Shells for System Accounts? Uwe Hermann wondered which system users should get a valid shell and which shouldn't. Colin Watson explained that it's a long-term goal to disable the shell for some system users after checking on a case-by-case basis. Javier Fernández-Sanguino Peña added disabling recommendations and provided information on using nologin as shell.

Sailing with Debian. Members of the Austrian InnoC association have won the first Microtransat challenge for autonomous sailing vessels in Toulouse. Their boat is a conventional model sailing vessel enhanced with a fan-less Mini-ITX computer running Debian GNU/Linux at 600 MHz with 1 GB flash memory and a number of sensors.

Interview with the DPL. Thomas Schönhoff published an interview he conducted with Anthony Towns, the current Debian project leader, and his deputy Steve McIntyre. The questions cover stable updates, personal visions, relationship with derivatives, support for stable releases and integrating Hurd, BSD and SELinux.

Changing the Optimisation for compiled Packages. Rogério Brito wondered about the feasibility of compiling some packages with the optimisation -Os instead of -O2. Thiemo Seufer explained that for some CPUs either optimisation may be better while it isn't for the other. Gabor Gombas added that using -Os on a large scale may discover new and interesting compiler bugs.

Changed Location for CGI Scripts. Alexis Sukrieh pointed out that lintian claimed that CGI scripts should be installed in /usr/lib/cgi-lib instead of /usr/lib/cgi-bin. Joey Hess added that this was discussed in 2003 but support for it has been dropped afterwards. Steve Langasek reported that this requirement has been reverted in more recent policy.

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 291 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. To find out which orphaned packages are installed on your system the wnpp-alert program from devscripts may be helpful.

Removed Packages. 1 package has been removed from the Debian archive during the past week:

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This issue of Debian Weekly News was edited by Mohammed Adnène Trojette, Sebastian Feltel and Martin 'Joey' Schulze.