Debian Weekly News - October 4th, 2005

Welcome to this year's 40th issue of DWN, the weekly newsletter for the Debian community. Donald Feinberg, vice-president of Gartner predicted the end of Unix in 10-15 years and the rise of GNU/Linux. Debian GNU/Linux is used as a server running several open source products for analytics at the Australian Taxation Office.

DPL Team Status Issue Tracker. Andreas Schuldei announced a Wiki page in order to maintain transparency of the scud team since they did not have formal meetings and minutes for a longer time. The list includes funding, hardware and hosting requests, communications issues and more.

Release Team Changes. Colin Watson announced his resignation from the release team due to his time constraints. To let the release team benefit from his experience, he's going to stay in the team but merely as an engineer. A new release manager will be added to the team soon in order to fill the gap.

Work Needed and Prospective Packages. David Moreno Garza reported that in total 979 wnpp bugs have been closed in several investigation runs. Requests for packages and intentions to submit packages that are older than a year and haven't seen any significant activity were removed by this action. He will repeat this process automatically in the future.

Debian Network Introduction. Steve Kemp wrote a basic introduction into the network setup with Debian GNU/Linux. The article includes setting the hostname and IP address, setting up DNS, gives a short introduction into routing and explains hostname lookup.

New teTeX 3.0 Packages for Debian. Frank Küster announced that a new major version of teTeX will be uploaded to unstable when library transitions are allowed again. He asked developers of packages that maintain a connection to teTeX to test these with the new version of teTeX in order to avoid problems later.

Debian Meeting Archive. Holger Levsen announced a permanent Debian meeting archive that contains audio and video files as well as slides and example codes from various real-life Debian meetings. It currently hosts videos and slides from the Debian QA meeting in Darmstadt, videos from this year's Debian conference in Helsinki and slides from the Debian Day at this year's LinuxTag in Karlsruhe.

Resume from the Darmstadt QA Team Meeting. Andreas Barth reported about the productive meeting of the QA team in Darmstadt, Germany. Major results include the removal of very old and unused packages. There have also been discussions about how to support external contributors and how to make packages more independent of each other by using plugins with stable interfaces.

Dropping non-SMP Kernels for IA64? Dann Frazier wondered if kernel images for IA64 machines without symmetric multi processing (SMP) could be dropped from the distribution. He asserted that all current IA64 machines on the market are capable of SMP. Supporting such flavours is difficult because such configurations don't seem to get much attention upstream.

Planet Debian versus Mailing Lists. Wolfgang Borgert wondered how to filter important Debian development information from Planet Debian. Margarita Manterola asserted that it is part of the essence of blogging to state ones opinion and not be easily flamed for it like on a mailing list. She also agreed that sharing important development information should be done on the lists.

Future of the S/390 Port. Gerhard Tonn reported that he won't be able to work on the S/390 port anymore and is looking for a successor, who is willing to take over the administration of the buildd servers, analysing build failures and work on the requalification of this port for the etch release. Bastian Blank stated his willingness to take over the port.

Special Input Event Device Files. Frank Lichtenheld wondered how pbbuttonsd should handle more than four event device files that are automatically created by makedev. Marco d'Itri suggested to just educate the user if they are not using udev already. Christoph Hellwig, though, stated that makedev should just create all 32 device nodes.

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

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

Orphaned Packages. 6 packages were orphaned this week and require a new maintainer. This makes a total of 191 orphaned packages. Many thanks to the previous maintainers who contributed to the Free Software community. Please see the 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.

Removed Packages. 33 packages have been removed from the Debian archive during the past two weeks:

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This issue of Debian Weekly News was edited by Martin Zobel-Helas and Martin 'Joey' Schulze.