Debian Weekly News - August 10th, 1999
Welcome to the 30th issue of Debian Weekly News, a newsletter for the Debian developer community.
The freeze date for Potato has been set: We will freeze on November first, so long as some items like boot floppies and release critical bug fixes are well under way at that point.
Wichert Akkerman, the Debian Project Leader, addressed the FHS /usr/share/doc issue: "I request all developers to NOT move to the FHS right now". The Technical Committee is working to resolve the issue, and packages already using /usr/share/doc will likely just need to be changed again when they reach a resolution.
A rumor is circulating that Debian may have stopped accepting new maintainers until after potato is released. There has been no official response to this rumor yet.
Stephane Bortzmeyer has put together a web page that is the "unofficial list of unofficial sources" for Debian packages. It is a list of apt archives outside Debian proper, and anyone can add their archive to the list. This promises to make it much easier to find apt information. Combined with the rumors of a closed new maintainer process mentioned above, some people think this is the beginning of a slippery slope that leads to a Red hat style contrib. However, others point out that these apt repositories are nothing new, and many are in fact maintained by developers.
A warning to people using fakeroot: The current fakeroot and tar in unstable do not get along. Packages built with them will have files owned by the user who built the package, not by root.
Two security items this week: New versions of isdnutils and the cfingerd package in stable have been released to fix various security holes.
As usual, a summary of news from the Debian-JP project is available.
New packages added to Debian this week include the following 30 and an astonishing 56 more:
- dconfig: dconfig - The Debian config collection tool
- dog: Enhanced replacement for cat
- genius: Command-line and gnome calculator (dev)
- kernellab: Manage kernel configs for many machines easily
- kforth: Small Forth Interpreter Written in C++
- lam1: A free, fast MPI implementation for cluster and SMP parallel processing (dev and runtime)
- lib-gnu.getopt-java: GNU getopt - Java port
- lib-gnu.regexp-java: Regular Expressions for Java
- lib-rxtx-java: native interface to serial ports in Java
- lib-sax-java: A Java API for SAX XML parsing
- lib-xp-java: An XML Parser in Java
- libfile-tail-perl: File::Tail perl module
- libgcj0: Java runtime library for use with gcj (dev)
- librxp1: Shared library for XML parsing and validating (dev)
- libucdsnmp3.6: UCD SNMP (dev)
- muffin: A personal and extensible Web proxy
- osh: Operator's Shell
- penguineyes: xeyes lookalike (gnome version)
- phplib: PHP library for easy writing web applications
- poc: Objective-C compiler
- powertweak: Tool to tune system for optimal performance
- raidtools2: Utilities to support 'new-style' RAID disks
- toshutils: Toshiba laptop utilities
- whowatch: Real-time user logins monitoring tool.
Server news:
- Jason Gunthorpe brought Faure, Kubrick and Albert back to life after the previously reported disk failure. However, the contents of the home directory for these systems has been lost.
This issue is a little short because of LinuxWorld Expo. Randolph Chung will be guest editing next week. Pre-expo reports from the show floor indicate an interesting development: Debian is not alone. Four Debian hardware and software vendors are also exhibiting at the expo, including Kachina Tech and Stormix. This in contrast to last year's booth which was an island of Debian, awash in a sea of Red Hat.
Thanks to Christian Meder, Randolph Chung, and Katsura S. Yoshio for contributing.
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This issue of Debian Weekly News was edited by Joey Hess.