Debian Weekly News - February 22nd, 2005

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Debian Weekly News
http://www.debian.org/News/weekly/2005/08/
Debian Weekly News - February 22nd, 2005
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Welcome to this year's 8th issue of DWN, the weekly newsletter for the
Debian community. Manoj Srivastava [1]announced that only one week is
left for nominations for the upcoming project leader [2]elections. In
order to achieve international standards recognition, the [3]LSB has
been [4]submitted to the ISO/IEEE.

 1. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2005/02/msg00006.html
 2. http://www.debian.org/vote/2005/vote_001
 3. http://www.linuxbase.org/
 4. http://linux.slashdot.org/linux/05/01/16/0232222.shtml

Debconf Template Translation. Christian Perrier [5]gave an update on
the status of debconf translations in Debian. Most debconf templates
are now handled through [6]po-debconf, which makes it much easier to
handle translations. There are only 102 packages left which are not
using this utility. He plans to start uploading non-maintainer
versions of these with translation support enabled. Lucas Wall
[7]provided a status page for those packages.

 5. http://lists.debian.org/debian-i18n/2005/02/msg00038.html
 6. http://packages.debian.org/po-debconf
 7. http://people.debian.org/~lwall/i18n/

Moria Author found. Robert Koeneke, the original author of [8]Moria
(a rogue-like game) [9]contacted debian-devel and was amazed to see
people were still playing the game he had started developing 20 years
ago. He is now looking into re-licensing it under the [10]GNU GPL,
which would help move Moria, Angband and derivatives into the main
archive.

 8. http://packages.debian.org/moria
 9. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2005/02/msg00806.html
 10. http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html

Roles and Responsibilities of the FTPmaster Team. Matthew Garrett
wrote an [11]explanation of what the ftpmasters do, the first in a
series of articles about the various teams in Debian. They manage the
master archive, add and remove packages from it, and work with the
release managers to ensure that files in the archive are in the
correct place. The ftpmaster team wrote and maintain the scripts used
to automate much of this. They only worry about the master archive,
the mirror network is handled by the mirror team.

 11. http://lists.debian.org/debian-project/2005/02/msg00184.html

Broken Dependencies in Unstable. Dan Jacobson [12]wondered about the
broken dependencies he notices every now and then. Colin Watson
[13]answered that this is the problem that the testing distribution is
intended to solve. Goswin Brederlow [14]explained that this is caused
by strictly versioned dependencies to binary-all packages.

 12. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2005/02/msg00659.html
 13. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2005/02/msg00666.html
 14. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2005/02/msg00696.html

Archive Verification for Sarge? Andreas Barth [15]mentioned that there
is a chance to get [16]apt updated in sarge. Therefore a [17]call for
help was sent to developers who are interested in having automatic
archive verification in the upcoming release. To achieve this Florian
Weimer [18]created a detailed [19]status report.

 15. http://lists.debian.org/debian-project/2005/02/msg00097.html
 16. http://packages.debian.org/apt
 17. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2005/02/msg00646.html
 18. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2005/02/msg00969.html
 19. http://www.enyo.de/fw/software/apt-secure/

Automatic Dependency Calculation. Joel Aelwyn [20]proposed to
implement dh_devincludes that would calculate the proper development
library dependencies of a given package during the build stage. He
wondered if this needs special treatment for versioned dependencies
and whether other languages than C should be supported.

 20. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2005/02/msg00855.html

Dropping Architectures? In response to build failures on some
architectures due to missing disk space it was [21]quickly
[22]suggested to drop some architectures from the release. Goswin
Brederlow [23]asserted that several bugs have been found while porting
which improves the software and Steve Langasek [24]explained this in
detail and asked where exactly Debian wasted time.

 21. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2005/02/msg00907.html
 22. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2005/02/msg00992.html
 23. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2005/02/msg00994.html
 24. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2005/02/msg00995.html

New mplayer for Debian. Andrea Mennucc [25]announced that has uploaded
new mplayer [26]packages that should comply with Debian's needs.
Upstream developers have resolved the remaining license issues over
the last months. The support for DeCSS has also been removed from the
Debian package because of legal problems.

 25. http://lists.debian.org/debian-legal/2005/02/msg00175.html
 26. http://tonelli.sns.it/pub/mplayer/sarge

Potential License Problem with PHP. Martin 'Joey' Schulze [27]quoted
parts of the PHP licenses and wondered if Debian was allowed to name
their packages as upstream did. MJ Ray [28]pointed out that the
relevant phrase has been strengthened for PHP4 and asserted that it
doesn't forbid Debian to continue naming the packages PHP. Steve
Langasek, however, [29]explained that Debian does indeed not have
permissions to do so.

 27. http://lists.debian.org/debian-legal/2005/02/msg00222.html
 28. http://lists.debian.org/debian-legal/2005/02/msg00223.html
 29. http://lists.debian.org/debian-legal/2005/02/msg00224.html

Debian Expos Visibility. The Debian project [30]announced its presence
at seven conferences and exhibitions: [31]CONSOL in Mexico City
(February 22nd - 25th), [32]FOSDEM in Brussels, Belgium (February 26th
- 27th), [33]Asia Open Source Software Symposium in Beijing, China
(February 28th - March 4th), [34]Chemnitzer Linux-Tage in Chemnitz,
Germany (March 5th - 6th), [35]CeBIT in Hannover, Germany (March 10th
- 16th), and [36]IT/Linux Days in Lörrach, Germany (March 11th -
14th). Several talks with Debian affiliation will be held as well.

 30. http://www.debian.org/News/2005/20050218
 31. http://www.debian.org/events/2005/0222-consol
 32. http://www.debian.org/events/2005/0226-fosdem
 33. http://www.debian.org/events/2005/0228-aosss
 34. http://www.debian.org/events/2005/0305-linuxtag-chemnitz
 35. http://www.debian.org/events/2005/0310-cebit
 36. http://www.debian.org/events/2005/0311-itlinuxdays

Debian Package Status Graphs. Wouter Verhelst [37]pondered whether to
continue generating package status graphics. There's a graph for each
developer email address that shows the evolution of the number of
packages, bugs, and the average number of bugs per package, e.g for
the [38]QA group.

 37. http://www.grep.be/blog/2005/02/21/#bugs_packages_graphs
 38. [e-mail:/~wouter/graph/packages/packages@qa.debian.org.png]

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

 * DSA 683: [39]postgresql -- Arbitrary code execution.
 * DSA 684: [40]typespeed -- Arbitrary group games code execution.
 * DSA 685: [41]emacs21 -- Arbitrary code execution.
 * DSA 686: [42]gftp -- Directory traversal vulnerability.
 * DSA 687: [43]bidwatcher -- Format string vulnerability.

 39. http://www.debian.org/security/2005/dsa-683
 40. http://www.debian.org/security/2005/dsa-684
 41. http://www.debian.org/security/2005/dsa-685
 42. http://www.debian.org/security/2005/dsa-686
 43. http://www.debian.org/security/2005/dsa-687

New or Noteworthy Packages. The following packages were added to the
unstable Debian archive [44]recently or contain important updates.

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

 * [45]capiutils -- Utilities for CAPI-capable ISDN cards.
 * [46]doodled -- Desktop search engine (daemon).
 * [47]mpich-bin -- MPI parallel computing system implementation.
 * [48]mpich-mpd-bin -- MPI parallel computing system implementation,
   MPD version.

 45. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/net/capiutils
 46. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/utils/doodled
 47. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/devel/mpich-bin
 48. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/devel/mpich-mpd-bin

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 [49]contributing
page to find out how to help. We're looking forward to receiving your
mail at [50]dwn@debian.org.

 49. http://www.debian.org/News/weekly/contributing
 50. mailto:dwn@debian.org


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