Debian Weekly News - March 7th, 2006

Welcome to this year's 10th issue of DWN, the weekly newsletter for
the Debian community. If you are in doubt about the proper
distribution for you, try the [1]Linux distribution chooser. Manoj
Srivastava [2]called for [3]votes on the General Resolution to
address the Debian project's position on the [4]GNU Free
Documentation License a second time. Ballots can be casted until March
11th.

 1. http://www.zegeniestudios.net/ldc/index.php?firsttime=true
 2. http://lists.debian.org/debian-vote/2006/03/msg00074.html
 3. http://www.debian.org/vote/2006/vote_001
 4. http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html

Requirements and Rights for Sub-Projects. Martin Michlmayr [5]started
a discussion on requirements and rights for official Debian
[6]sub-projects. He asked in particular if a sub-projects may handle
their own finances and ask for donations if they have special needs
such as [7]Debonaras.

 5. http://lists.debian.org/debian-project/2006/03/msg00004.html
 6. http://www.debian.org/devel/#projects
 7. http://www.debonaras.org/

Debian/kFreeBSD for AMD64. Robert Millan [8]announced the
availability of an experimental base Debian GNU/kFreeBSD system for
the amd64 architecture. It uses the GNU C library ported by Petr
Salinger and requires a running version of FreeBSD 6.0 on amd64 and
works only as chroot environment. Aurelien Jarno [9]added a note
about the setup of a build daemon for this system.

 8. http://lists.debian.org/debian-amd64/2006/03/msg00017.html
 9. http://blog.aurel32.net/?p=25

Subscribing to new CDD Packages? Enrico Zini [10]reported about an
idea to create a mechanism that will allow users to receive new
packages for their custom Debian distribution (CDD) when they are
properly tagged for this particular suite. A solution still needs to
be found to mark packages for installation, though.

 10. http://lists.debian.org/debian-custom/2006/03/msg00001.html

IRC Debate for the Project Leader Election. Thaddeus Black
[11]announced the live debate of this year's project leader candidates
on IRC. The debate will be moderated by Don Armstrong and take place
on Thursday, 16 March 2006 from 22:30 UTC to 01:00 UTC on
#debian-dpl-debate on irc.debian.org. He asked for volunteers for the
panel and questions to be asked the candidates.

 11. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2006/03/msg00001.html

Supporting Backports officially. Joseph Smidt [12]wondered if
[13]backports will ever be officially supported by Debian. Norbert
Tretkowski [14]explained that it may be possible to provide some
official backports in the future but quite unlikely to make all
packages from backports.org official.

 12. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2006/01/msg01403.html
 13. http://backports.org/
 14. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2006/01/msg01414.html

QA Activities List. Lars Wirzenius [15]asked if there exists a list of
what QA activities are being performed as he contemplates to help but
not duplicate the effort of others. Such a list is composed within the
[16]Wiki for easier maintenance. Jeroen van Wolffelaar additionally
[17]asked for help maintaining the [18]qa.debian.org website.

 15. http://lists.debian.org/debian-qa/2006/02/msg00033.html
 16. http://wiki.debian.org/qa%2edebian%2eorg/activities
 17. http://lists.debian.org/debian-qa/2006/02/msg00042.html
 18. http://qa.debian.org/

DPL Campaigning Summaries. David Schmitt [19]announced that he is
producing a [20]summary of the questions asked and answers given by
the 2006 project leader [21]candidates during the election campaign.
The summary will be updated as questions are asked and answers
published.

 19. http://lists.debian.org/debian-vote/2006/03/msg00056.html
 20. http://debian.edv-bus.at/vote-2006/questions.html
 21. http://www.debian.org/vote/2006/vote_002

New packages.debian.org Host. The Debian project [22]announced the
re-availability of the [23]packages.debian.org service on a new
machine. The system has been donated by [24]Schlund + Partner where it
is hosted as well. It is a Dual-Core Opteron and only runs this
service for Debian users and developers.

 22. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2006/03/msg00004.html
 23. http://packages.debian.org/
 24. http://www.schlund.de/

Checking Build Logs. Samuel Thibault [25]demonstrated that missing
function declarations can cause problems in running systems and
proposed to add compiler flags that will cause the build to fail when
a function is not declared. Kurt Roeckx [26]added more problematic
programming errors that should be taken care of. Steve Greenland
[27]stated that there is no excuse for these bugs since they are easy
to fix.

 25. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2006/01/msg01546.html
 26. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2006/01/msg01550.html
 27. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2006/01/msg01555.html

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

 * DSA 984: [28]xpdf -- Several problems.
 * DSA 985: [29]libtasn1-2 -- Arbitrary code execution.
 * DSA 986: [30]gnutls11 -- Arbitrary code execution.
 * DSA 987: [31]tar -- Arbitrary code execution.

 28. http://www.debian.org/security/2006/dsa-984
 29. http://www.debian.org/security/2006/dsa-985
 30. http://www.debian.org/security/2006/dsa-986
 31. http://www.debian.org/security/2006/dsa-987

New or Noteworthy Packages. The following packages were added to the
unstable Debian archive [32]recently or contain important updates.

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

 * [33]dibbler-client -- Portable DHCPv6 client.
 * [34]fontconfig-config -- Generic font configuration library -
   configuration.
 * [35]galago-daemon -- Galago presence daemon.
 * [36]lastfmsubmitd -- Submission daemon for the Last.fm social
   music network.
 * [37]optipng -- Advanced PNG (Portable Network Graphics) optimiser.
 * [38]slimscrobbler -- SlimServer plugin that submits listening data
   to Last.FM.
 * [39]zatacka -- Arcade multiplayer game like nibbles.

 33. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/admin/dibbler-client
 34. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/libs/fontconfig-config
 35. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/gnome/galago-daemon
 36. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/sound/lastfmsubmitd
 37. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/graphics/optipng
 38. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/sound/slimscrobbler
 39. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/games/zatacka

Orphaned Packages. 2 packages were orphaned this week and require a
new maintainer. This makes a total of 234 orphaned packages. Many
thanks to the previous maintainers who contributed to the Free
Software community. Please see the [40]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.

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

 * [41]drsync -- Wrapper for file synchronisation via rsync.
   ([42]Bug#354843)
 * [43]yaboot -- Yet Another Bootloader. ([44]Bug#354974)

 41. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/misc/drsync
 42. http://bugs.debian.org/354843
 43. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/admin/yaboot
 44. http://bugs.debian.org/354974

DWN needs Contributors. If you want to continue reading DWN, please
help produce it. We need volunteer writers who watch the Debian
community and report about what is going on, preferably with
ready-to-add items. Please see the [45]contributing page to find out
how to help. We're looking forward to receiving your mail at
[46]dwn@debian.org.

 45. http://www.debian.org/News/weekly/contributing
 46. mailto:dwn@debian.org