Debian Weekly News - May 4th, 2004

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Debian Weekly News
http://www.debian.org/News/weekly/2004/18/
Debian Weekly News - May 4th, 2004
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Welcome to this year's 18th issue of DWN, the weekly newsletter for
the Debian community. The [1]debian-devel list carried many
discussions about releasing sarge in light of recent editorial changes
to the [2]social contract, leading to more general resolutions and
much cross-talk.

 1. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/
 2. http://www.debian.org/social_contract

Several General Resolutions proposed. Henning Makholm [3]summarised
all recently proposed general resolutions on the [4]social contract
and other foundation documents. In the interest of reducing the risk
of somebody voting for something they did not intend to, simply out of
confusion, he proposed that the actual voting part of the ballot
should contain ultra-short summaries of which option is which, rather
than just "Option A: Steve Langasek's proposal" and so forth.

 3. http://lists.debian.org/debian-vote-0405/msg00062.html
 4. http://www.debian.org/social_contract

Bootstraping Debian from Knoppix. Norbert Tretkowski wrote a [5]short
howto on installing Debian stable using [6]Knoppix and
[7]debootstrap. This method is helpful especially when the
boot-floppies from woody don't work with your hardware, but you still
want to install Debian stable.

 5. http://www.inittab.de/manuals/debootstrap.html
 6. http://www.knopper.net/knoppix/
 7. http://packages.debian.org/debootstrap

Is there still a Place for Debian Planet? The Debian Planet staff
[8]wondered if the [9]Debian Planet (DP) news website is still
serving a useful purpose for the community, especially in light of the
more popular and confusingly-similar named [10]Planet Debian weblog
site. Several readers replied that they would miss DP if it went off
air and gave suggestions on possible changes to the site. DP is always
looking for news stories, especially longer articles, tips and tricks,
or Debian specific HOWTOs.

 8. http://www.debianplanet.org/node.php?id=1100
 9. http://www.debianplanet.org/
 10. http://planet.debian.net/

Preliminary Schedule for Debian Conference 4. A preliminary
[11]schedule has been published for the upcoming [12]Debconf, the
annual Debian conference, which will take place in Porto Alegre,
Brazil this year. Andreas Schuldei [13]said the program is so good you
should attend, if necessary selling your car to raise the airfare. He
also [14]announced a limited amount of travel support for developers.

 11. http://www.debconf.org/debconf4/?q=node/view/35
 12. http://www.debian.org/events/2004/0526-debconf
 13. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce-0405/msg00000.html
 14. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce-0405/msg00001.html

Debian Installer Beta-4. Joey Hess [15]announced the fourth beta of
the new sarge installer on nine of Debian's eleven architectures. New
features include the detection of other installed operating systems
and experimental support for the Linux 2.6 kernel on i386. The new
installer has already been translated into 35 languages. Joey also
wrote a [16]retrospective on the difficult installer release process,
with suggestions on how to improve things next time.

 15. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce-0404/msg00025.html
 16. http://lists.debian.org/debian-boot-0405/msg00006.html

Debian Conference Status Report. Pablo Lorenzzoni [17]reported that
the registration period for the [18]Debian conference in Porto Alegre,
Brazil is almost over. Due to a number of generous sponsors the first
150 attendants will get free accommodation. Additionally, the hotel
has special offers for DebConf attendees who want to stay longer. The
call for papers is over and the most interesting talks will be
selected and published soon.

 17. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce-0404/msg00021.html
 18. http://www.debian.org/events/2004/0526-debconf

New /media Hierarchy. Joey Hess [19]reported that new versions of
[20]base-files have introduced the /media directory for new
installations and stopped creating the /cdrom and /floppy directories.
Since the paths are hard-coded in many programs Joey ponders whether
it would be sane to have /cdrom and /floppy be symlinks into /media
for sarge?

 19. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-0404/msg07012.html
 20. http://packages.debian.org/base-files

Naming Scheme for PEAR and PECL Packages. Andreas Tille is in [21]need
of some PHP PAER packages for the [22]debian-med sub-project. Steve
Langasek [23]pointed out that the current consensus among the php4
maintainers is that packages for PEAR modules ought to be called
php-*, and packages for PECL modules (and extensions shipped with
php4) ought to be called php4-* and php5-* as appropriate.

 21. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-0404/msg07277.html
 22. http://www.debian.org/devel/debian-med/
 23. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-0404/msg07320.html

Request to add Package Tags. Enrico Zini [24]noticed that many
developers still don't know that they can tag their packages using
[25]debtags, nor how this can be done. He explained how developers can
add tags to their packages and asked them to add them. Tags are
grouped by "facet" or "namespace", which basically is a different
point of view from where to look at the package archive.

 24. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-0404/msg07496.html
 25. http://packages.debian.org/debtags

Draft Position Statement on the GFDL. Manoj Srivastava [26]started a
new discussion on a draft position [27]statement on the GNU [28]Free
Documentation License. The Debian project has been [29]discussing
problems with the FDL since November 2001.

 26. http://lists.debian.org/debian-legal-0405/msg00030.html
 27. http://people.debian.org/~srivasta/Position_Statement.xhtml
 28. http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html
 29. http://lists.debian.org/debian-legal-0202/msg00071.html

Power Management in Debian. Matthias Grimm wanted to [30]know how to
rearrange the scripts for [31]pbbuttonsd. To become more flexible and
maybe share development and infrastructure with other power management
systems like apmd the script environment and maybe the interface have
to be reformed.

 30. http://lists.debian.org/debian-powerpc-0404/msg00455.html
 31. http://packages.debian.org/pbbuttonsd

Security Updates. You know the drill. Please make sure that you update
your systems if you have any of these packages installed.

 * [32]eterm -- Indirect arbitrary command execution.
 * [33]mc -- Several vulnerabilities.
 * [34]libpng -- Denial of service.
 * [35]rsync -- Directory traversal bug.
 * [36]flim -- Insecure temporary file creation.

 32. http://www.debian.org/security/2004/dsa-496
 33. http://www.debian.org/security/2004/dsa-497
 34. http://www.debian.org/security/2004/dsa-498
 35. http://www.debian.org/security/2004/dsa-499
 36. http://www.debian.org/security/2004/dsa-500

New or Noteworthy Packages. The following packages were added to the
unstable Debian archive [37]recently or contain important updates.

 37. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/newpkg_main

 * [38]aespipe -- AES-encryption tool for tar/cpio and loop-aes
   images.
 * [39]chan-capi -- Common ISDN API 2.0 implementation for Asterisk.
 * [40]elog -- Logbook system to manage notes through a Web
   interface.
 * [41]hashalot -- Read and hash a passphrase.
 * [42]knockd -- Small port-knock daemon.
 * [43]hyperlatex -- Creating HTML using LaTeX documents.
 * [44]no-ip -- Second-generation Linux client for dynamic DNS
   service.
 * [45]odot -- Task list manager written in Gtk2-Perl.
 * [46]paintlib2 -- C++ class library for image manipulation.
 * [47]paxctl -- User-space utility to control PaX flags - new major
   upstream version.
 * [48]pktstat -- Top-like utility for network connections usage.
 * [49]qprof -- Profiling utilities for Linux.
 * [50]tedia2sql -- Converts a Dia diagram to various SQL dialects.

 38. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/utils/aespipe
 39. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/comm/chan-capi
 40. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/web/elog
 41. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/utils/hashalot
 42. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/net/knockd
 43. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/tex/hyperlatex
 44. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/net/no-ip
 45. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/x11/odot
 46. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/libs/paintlib2
 47. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/admin/paxctl
 48. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/net/pktstat
 49. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/devel/qprof
 50. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/graphics/tedia2sql

Orphaned Packages. 8 packages were orphaned this week and require a
new maintainer. This makes a total of 165 orphaned packages. Many
thanks to the previous maintainers who contributed to the Free
Software community. Please see the [51]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.

 51. http://www.debian.org/devel/wnpp/

 * [52]dcl -- GNU Enterprise - Double Choco Latte. ([53]Bug#247231)
 * [54]licq -- ICQ clone. ([55]Bug#246972)
 * [56]ptknettools -- Selection of Internet service clients written
   in Perl/Tk. ([57]Bug#246855)
 * [58]raidtools -- Utilities to support 'old-style' RAID disks.
   ([59]Bug#247155)
 * [60]raidtools2 -- Utilities to support 'new-style' RAID disks.
   ([61]Bug#247156)
 * [62]sphinx2 -- Speech recognition library - default acoustic
   model. ([63]Bug#246540)
 * [64]splay -- Sound player for MPEG-1,2 layer 1,2,3.
   ([65]Bug#246971)
 * [66]xosview -- X based system monitor. ([67]Bug#246973)

 52. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/web/dcl
 53. http://bugs.debian.org/247231
 54. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/net/licq
 55. http://bugs.debian.org/246972
 56. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/net/ptknettools
 57. http://bugs.debian.org/246855
 58. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/admin/raidtools
 59. http://bugs.debian.org/247155
 60. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/admin/raidtools2
 61. http://bugs.debian.org/247156
 62. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/sound/sphinx2-bin
 63. http://bugs.debian.org/246540
 64. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/sound/splay
 65. http://bugs.debian.org/246971
 66. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/utils/xosview
 67. http://bugs.debian.org/246973

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 [68]contributing
page to find out how to help. We're looking forward to receiving your
mail at [69]dwn@debian.org.

 68. http://www.debian.org/News/weekly/contributing
 69. mailto:dwn@debian.org


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