path: root/english/News/weekly/2004/19/index.wml

#use wml::debian::weeklynews::header PUBDATE="2004-05-11" SUMMARY="OASIS, Documentation, Installer, SATA-RAID, Trademarks, MiniConf, Licenses, Kernel, PNG, Bittorrents"
# $Id$

<p>Welcome to this year's 19th issue of DWN, the weekly newsletter for the
Debian community.  If you were a fan of the original PacMan game, you'll
probably like the <a href="http://pacmanhattan.com/">New York version</a> of
it as well.  The <a href="http://www.ffii.org/">FFII</a> has learned that the
EU Council of Ministers has decided to ignore the EU Parliament, and instead
plan to <a href="http://swpat.ffii.org/news/04/cons0408/">establish</a> a
reckless "patent everything" approach to software and business models.</p>

<p><strong>Debian OASIS Membership.</strong> Mark Johnson <a
href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2004/05/msg00002.html">\
reported</a> about Debian's membership in OASIS, the Organization for the
Advancement of Structured Information Standards.  Debian is the only Free
Software organization with any representation at this standards organization,
and hence provides the only Free Software voice at OASIS.  All Debian
developers are welcome to join any OASIS Technical Committee in which they are
interested and are encouraged to do so.</p>

<p><strong>How much Documentation is there?</strong>  In light of recent
discussion of <a
href="http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cups-horror.html">documentation
quality</a>, Karsten M. Self looked at the <a
href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-user/2004/05/msg00959.html">quantity</a>
of documentation included in Debian.  A typical desktop installation
includes about 1,600 manpages which correspond to over 27,000 printed pages,
and the 60,000+ manpages in all of Debian
unstable compare to over 261,000 pages printed, or 523 books' worth, or
$&nbsp;9,152 in photocopy costs.  That doesn't count READMEs, HOWTOs, RFCs,
Linux Gazette, info pages, and other online documentation also
available.</p>

<p><strong>Debian-Installer Release Process Retrospective.</strong> Joey Hess
<a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-boot/2004/05/msg00006.html">\
reported</a> about the last <a href="$(HOME)/devel/debian-installer/">\
debian-installer</a> <a href="http://kitenet.net/~joey/blog/entry/beta4/">\
beta release</a>.  This release had severe problems with regards to bug-fixing
and testing.  He drew several ideas to improve the work of the installer team.
Among others these include speeding up their pulse and switching to testing-style
udeb propagation.  He would also like to see a remote test laboratory that
could be used for tests of most architectures.</p>

<p><strong>Serial ATA-RAID on Debian.</strong> Karl Schmidt explained in a <a
href="http://xtronics.com/reference/SATA-RAID-Debian.htm">howto</a> that the
last beta release of the debian-installer supports serial ATA (SATA), but
going on to RAID is still a manual task.  The basic idea was to install Debian
on one drive, partition the second drive with just the same sizes, copying the
Debian installation over from the first disk, then repartitioning it and
attaching it to the degraded array.</p>

<p><strong>Draft for Modification of the DFSG.</strong> Buddha Buck sent in a
first <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-vote/2004/04/msg00304.html">\
draft</a> proposal for modification of the <a
href="$(HOME)/social_contract#guidelines">Debian Free Software Guidelines</a>
(DFSG) to allow certain forms of documentation, fonts, and other matters that
don't conform to the existing DFSG into Debian.  Basically he proposed to
mention documentation and other written materials, images, fonts, and sounds
and deal with them explicitly.</p>

<p><strong>Debian Trademarks.</strong> Ean Schuessler started a <a
href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-project/2004/05/msg00033.html">discussion</a>
on the usefulness of the Debian trademark since the legal counsel of <a
href="http://www.spi-inc.org/">SPI</a> believes that Debian would be best
served by abandoning its marks and purposefully making the term "Debian"
generic.  Enforcement is the only way that a trademark can truly be held.  The
owner must be the universal and final arbitrator of use and must show that use
is carefully monitored and enforced.  This, however, does involve a lot of
money.</p>

<p><strong>Debian Mini-Conference at LinuxTag.</strong> Alexander Schmehl is
looking for proposed talks for the <a
href="http://www.infodrom.org/Debian/events/LinuxTag2004/day.html">Debian
Day</a> which will be held on Thursday, June 24th, during <a
href="http://www.linuxtag.org/">LinuxTag</a> in Karlsruhe, Germany.  This is a
one day conference dedicated to Debian people, targeting advanced users and
developers.  Some talks were proposed but don't have a speaker yet.
Interested people should contact the <a
href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-events-eu/">debian-events-eu</a> list.</p>

<p><strong>Heise Portal running Debian.</strong> According to the German
computer magazine c't, the popular German tech news portal <a
href="http://www.heise.de/">heise.de</a> is being run on a cluster of Debian
3.0 
machines. They are using 23 rack-mounted Xeon-2-servers, 18 of them
delivering HTML pages, five offering back-end services like MySQL
databases and indexing, assisted by two Solaris machines for mail and
backup.  The site is fulfilling up to 92 million
HTTP requests per day, the databases have to process up to two million
request per hour, using a redundant load-balancing mechanism. Heise
chose Debian because of the comfortable package management and update
facilities.</p>

<p><strong>Debian License Summaries.</strong> Frank Lichtenheld and Andreas
Barth <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-legal/2004/04/msg00409.html">\
worked</a> on a way to <a href="$(HOME)/legal/licenses/">present</a> the
findings of debian-legal on the Debian website with regards to software
licenses.  Similar lists are maintained by the <a
href="http://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list">Free Software
Foundation</a> and the <a
href="http://opensource.org/licenses/index.html">Open Source
Initiative</a>.  However, the Debian project uses different
criteria to judge the categorisation of licenses, as shown in the
<a href="$(HOME)/legal/licenses/byname">list</a>.</p>

<p><strong>Preferred License for Forums Content.</strong> Sebastian Feltel <a
href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-legal/2004/05/msg00069.html">wondered</a>
which license he should use or require for content in a <a
href="http://debianforum.de/">web-based forum</a>.  He has used the <a
href="http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html">GNU Free Documentation License</a>
before, but since it is considered non-free by the Debian project it is not
suited.</p>

<p><strong>Kernel Maintenance Group.</strong> Andres Salomon <a
href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2004/05/msg00288.html">suggested</a>
to form an <a href="http://alioth.debian.org/">Alioth</a> kernel packaging
project to facilitate kernel maintenance in Debian.  Francesco Lovergine <a
href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2004/05/msg00324.html">noted</a>
that the first step in this direction, the creation of the debian-kernel
mailing list, is done but apparently has missed its goal.</p>

<p><strong>PNG Library Maintenance.</strong> Josselin Mouette <a
href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2004/05/msg00306.html">suggested</a>
to adjust packages that link against a version of <code>libpng</code>.
Several packages still don't use versioned symbols and only require a
recompilation.  Using versioned symbols is a precondition for a smooth
transition for all packages still using <code>libpng2</code> or
<code>libpng10</code>.  After that's done, they should be adjusted to build
with libpng 1.2.x.</p>

<p><strong>Bittorrents of current Debian Release.</strong> Mattias Wadenstein
<a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-cd/2004/04/msg00112.html">\
announced</a> that bittorrents of the current release are <a
href="http://cdimage.debian.org/pub/test/deb-bt/debian-cd/torrents/3.0_r2/">\
available</a>.  This service is currently in beta stage, so please test it and
tell <a href="mailto:maswan@acc.umu.se">him</a> about any strange stuff.  Joey
Hess <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-cd/2004/05/msg00058.html">\
asked</a> if torrents could be created for the weekly built full sarge iso
images, since the next <a href="$(HOME)/devel/debian-installer/">\
debian-installer</a> beta release will include full iso images and not only
netinstall images.</p>

<p><strong>Debian with integrated XML Support.</strong> The Debian project <a
href="http://www.debian.org/News/2004/20040506">announced</a> that the
upcoming stable Debian release (code-named sarge) will feature fully
integrated XML support.  Multiple toolchains for XSL(T) processing, a fully
standards-compliant XML catalog system, and a Debian XML policy document for
both Debian developers and users provide the backbone of a complete,
out-of-the-box system for XML developers and authors.</p>

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

<ul>
<li><a href="$(HOME)/security/2004/dsa-501">exim</a> --
    Buffer overflows.
<li><a href="$(HOME)/security/2004/dsa-502">exim-tls</a> --
    Buffer overflows.
</ul>

<p><strong>New or Noteworthy Packages.</strong> The following packages were
added to the unstable Debian archive <a
href="http://packages.debian.org/unstable/newpkg_main">recently</a> or contain
important updates.</p>

<ul>
<li><a href="http://packages.debian.org/unstable/misc/bochs-svga">bochs-svga</a>
    -- SVGA plugin for Bochs.
<li><a href="http://packages.debian.org/unstable/otherosfs/burn">burn</a>
    -- Command line Data-CD, Audio-CD, ISO-CD, Copy-CD writing tool.
<li><a href="http://packages.debian.org/unstable/sound/cynthiune">cynthiune</a>
    -- Music player for GNUstep.
<li><a href="http://packages.debian.org/unstable/devel/mkvmlinuz">mkvmlinuz</a>
    -- Create a kernel to boot a PowerPC machine from Open Firmware.
<li><a href="http://packages.debian.org/unstable/x11/sdm">sdm</a>
    -- Secure Display Manager.
</ul>

<p><strong>Orphaned Packages.</strong> 3 packages were orphaned this week and
require a new maintainer.  This makes a total of 162 orphaned packages.  Many
thanks to the previous maintainers who contributed to the Free Software
community.  Please see the <a href="$(HOME)/devel/wnpp/">WNPP pages</a> 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.</p>

<ul>
<li> <a href="http://packages.debian.org/unstable/interpreters/libncurses-ruby">ncurses-ruby</a>
     -- Ruby Extension for the ncurses C library.
     (<a href="http://bugs.debian.org/247983">Bug#247983</a>)
     </li>
<li> <a href="http://packages.debian.org/unstable/net/raggle">raggle</a>
     -- Console RSS aggregator.
     (<a href="http://bugs.debian.org/247988">Bug#247988</a>)
     </li>
<li> <a href="http://packages.debian.org/unstable/doc/rdoc">rdoc</a>
     -- Generate documentation from ruby source files.
     (<a href="http://bugs.debian.org/247989">Bug#247989</a>)
     </li>
</ul>

<p><strong>Want to continue reading DWN?</strong> 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 <a
href="$(HOME)/News/weekly/contributing">contributing page</a> to find out how
to help.  We're looking forward to receiving your mail at <a
href="mailto:dwn@debian.org">dwn@debian.org</a>.</p>

#use wml::debian::weeklynews::footer editor="Karsten M. Self, Michael Below, Martin 'Joey' Schulze"