Debian Weekly News #18 -- May 1st, 2002

Welcome to this year's eighteenth issue of DWN, the weekly newsletter for the Debian community. No week without a flamebait? This week's flamebaits include complaints about delaying archive maintenance, but, of course, lacks some substance. We're happy to include items from Gustavo Noronha Silva and Thomas Bliesener this time.

International Free Software Forum in Porto Alegre. Ronaldo Lages recently announced the third International Free Software Forum, held in Porto Alegre, Brazil. Many international organizations will be represented and people from all around the country and from many different countries are coming to take part in talks and workshops. The Debian Project will be represented by almost all brazilian developers. They will promote a course about Debian's installation and use, and will also give a talk about Debian and Debian-BR.

LILO Boot Screen for Debian. Philipp Wolfer wondered why all the top commercial distributions come with graphical LILO boot screens and Debian doesn't. When he installed Woody a few months ago he noticed that its LILO package supported the graphical boot menu, but didn't offer any image for it. Hence, Philipp created a boot screen image with the Debian logo, which you can download from here.

People with ATM Knowledge Required. Russell Coker recently intended to orphan the atm-tools package, since he doesn't own any real ATM hardware, so maintaining and debugging the package is a bit difficult for him. Even though, Marc Haber stepped forward, he can't do much debugging either. Somebody with access to ATM hardware and certain knowledge in the details should raise their voice and pick the package.

Debian Developer Portal. Igor Genibel announced a developer portal that summarizes all information and links, which are useful for a Debian developer. This includes bug reports, release critical bugs, lintian reports, buildd reports and a listing of all packages maintained by this very developer. However, Raphaël Hertzog pointed out that Tollef Fog Heen and Rob Bradford are working towards developer.debian.org site to perform much the same function.

Woody Release Announcement. Joey Hess started a discussion about writing a release announcement for Woody. He's collecting important bits that need to be mentioned besides the stock boring numbers like this many new packages, this many updated packages, yada yada. Here's a preliminary version. Comments should be sent to the debian-devel list.

Woody Release Security Round-up. Matt Zimmerman has been tracking security issues that affect Debian/Woody. He listed the security issues that he has tracked together with their current status. For each bug he attempted to verify that, in addition to being fixed in unstable, the fixed version has propagated to Woody. He also added an important request to other package maintainers, to indicate which version fixed the bug when closing a security related bug report.

OpenSSL and Software Licensed Under GPL. There has been some confusion whether it is allowed to link software, which is released under the terms of the GNU General Public License (GPL), with the OpenSSL library. The problematic item is the advertising clause, which both of the OpenSSL licenses contain. They add a restriction to the terms the GPL states, which is not permitted by the GPL.

Debian in User-Agent Identifier. With the release of Mozilla 0.9.9-4 the Debian Mozilla uses a customized User-Agent string, which indicates the distribution and Mozilla version. This is required by the current policy of User-Agent strings, which seems to be a result of a bug report, which reveals that the Debian version contains many patches which make it a derived version.

Daily Debian DVD Images. Attila Nagy recently announced that he started producing daily DVD ISO (not UDF) snapshots for IA-32 Woody and Sid in jigdo format. It is believed that this makes Debian the first distribution ever that offers daily DVD snapshots.

Woody CD Images up for Testing. Phil Hands announced new preliminary jigdo files for Woody CD Images. Phil said that images for Alpha and Sparc are currently missing or broken, but that should be fixed in time. Please test these images and report bugs to the debian-cd list.

SuperH Binary Distribution Ceased. A while ago, Joey noticed that not only the debian-superh list was rather quiet, but the archive didn't contain any binary files for this architecture. The porters are probably trying to solve a problem concerning too many halfway-incompatible architectures. The porters are working towards cross compiling. Anthony Towns explained later that our SuperH port has never been an installable distribution.

Debian Best Packaging Practices. Raphaël Hertzog started to work on a document named Best Packaging Practices by merging that project with the updated Debian Developers Reference. Adam Di Carlo will work on a new skeleton for the document, then brainstorming for good ideas will follow and finally contributers are required to fill the structure with life.

The Most Suitable Distribution for Developers? There has been an interesting poll "What is the most suitable distribution for software developers?" (english translation) in Geekforum, a Korean instance of Slashdot. More than 50 % of the readers who voted, preferred Debian GNU/Linux over other GNU/Linux distributions. They explained that it is because Debian GNU/Linux provides different version of essential development tools and the user can easily exchange software.

No Mayday Release. The much awaited release of Woody which was anticipated for May 1st will be postponed. Anthony Towns, the fearless release manager, submitted a new status report, saying that the only outstanding changes that need to be made are the standard security fixes that need to be made throughout the lifetime of stable anyway. His report contains a verbose description of these problems. There is also a poor sense of timing on behalf of a fair number of people, which slows down things.

Preparations for LinuxTag. Michael Bramer and Joey started with preparations for the upcoming LinuxTag, which will take place in Germany at the beginning of next month. LinuxTag is the largest and most important exhibition and conference in Europe, which covers Free Software and GNU/Linux. It is planned to hold a Debian Conference during the show. People who would like to ensure that certain things get done, should lift their voice on the debian-events-eu list.

Bootable CDs for Mipsel. A while ago Phil Hands noticed that mipsel CDs are not bootable and Karsten Merker explained that we currently don't have a bootloader, which is compileable under Linux and able to boot a DECstation from an ISO9660 filesystem. However, later he announced that he had just managed to build an ISO-9660 CD, which is bootable on a DECstation. In the meantime there has been further work on this topic, a patch against the current debian-cd package to allow the creation of bootable CDs for Debian/mipsel has been posted to the debian-cd list.

Bits from the DPL. Even though we blatantly missed this in our last issue, Bdale Garbee thanked everyone who participated in the election process this year, the outgoing leader, Ben Collins, and the current secretary, Manoj Srivastava. He asked for full support to our release manager, Anthony Towns, as he leads us through the final preparations for our upcoming release of Debian 3.0 (Woody). This was the first of what he hopes will be a fairly regular series of messages from the new Debian Project Leader.

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

• -- Displays information on ACPI devices.
• -- A Uwatec dive computer to PC sync tool.
• -- An interactive program to edit BibTeX bibliographies.
• -- The Linux Kernel Device Mapper userspace library.
• -- Script that quickly measures network device throughput.
• -- XML 1.0 parser for Eiffel based on expat.
• -- H323 Compatible Netmeeting clone for the Gnome Desktop.
• -- Perl IRC Statistics Generator.
• -- Builds a catalogue of objects from an astronomical image.
• -- A memory debugger for x86-linux.

Orphaned Packages. It seems that no packages were orphaned this week that still require a new maintainer. Hence, we're currently at at total of 82 orphaned packages.

Seen something interesting? Please drop us a note whenever you see an issue related to Debian, which you consider worth including in DWN. We don't see everything, unfortunately, and this month will be a busy one for us. Of course, we are also thankful for fully fledged items from volunteer writers. We're looking forward to receiving your mail at dwn@debian.org.