headers
Petter Reinholdtsen | 30 Nov 11:03

Dependency based boot sequencing release goal completed


-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1

Here is a new status update following the last report in
http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2008/03/msg00011.html

The release goal to prepare all init.d scripts for a dependency based
init.d script system can now be considered complete. 99.8% of all
packages in unstable now have the dependency information (2 packages
missing it), and a similar amount in Lenny contain the dependency
header. I am not sure how to calculate the fraction in Lenny.

The initial testing of these dependencies have discovered some bugs in
the headers, leading to incorrect boot or shutdown sequence, refusal
to activate dependency based boot sequencing or rejecting a package
installation. Most of these bugs are fixed, but some remain open in
BTS. More testers are needed to discover problems with currently
untested combination of packages. Please tag all such BTS issues
appropriately to get them to show up on

  http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/pkgreport.cgi?usertag=initscripts-ng-devel <at> lists.alioth.debian.org

At the moment, 1% of the debian population got insserv installed. More
testing is needed, to detect the remaining dependency errors.

The insserv package in unstable and testing is doing well, and a large
test suite has been written to verify that it is working correctly
before upload. This have made us confident that it is working very
well.
(Continue reading)

Permalink | Reply | 0 comments |
headers
Christoph Haas | 13 Nov 22:15
X-Face
Favicon

screenshots.debian.net

Hi everybody,

a picture is worth a thousand words. And thanks to 
screenshots.debian.net[0] this finally comes true for Debian packages. 
Several people have proposed a service to provide screenshots for them. So 
after getting other developers' opinions and suggestions I sat down and 
crafted a web application that allows to upload and provide screenshots.

Unless you are busy helping to fix RC bugs for the Lenny release please 
consider contributing screenshots of your favorite applications. Currently 
there are already over 260 screenshots available but there is still some 
way to go. Everybody can upload screenshots - you don't have to be a 
Debian developer or Debian maintainer to help. Your uploads will just be 
checked by the admin team and then published.

I would love to see the screenshots integrated into packages.debian.org and 
perhaps they even get used in graphical package managers like synaptic, 
kpackage, adept or gnome-apt. It is easy to refer to screenshots from your 
own application or web site. Just use these URLs:

Thumbnail (<= 160x120 pixels):
  http://screenshots.debian.net/thumbnail/PACKAGENAME
  (this URL returns a dummy thumbnail if no screenshot was found)

Package's page with all available screenshots:
  http://screenshots.debian.net/package/PACKAGENAME

There is still a couple of items on my to do list. But if you have further 
ideas on features, need a certain API or find bugs please tell me or let's 
discuss matters on debian-devel.
(Continue reading)

Permalink | Reply | 12 comments |
headers
Otavio Salvador | 13 Nov 01:04
Favicon

Debian Installer lenny release candidate 1


Debian Installer lenny release candidate 1
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

The Debian Installer team[1] is proud to announce the first release
candidate of the installer for Debian GNU/Linux Lenny.  Improvements
in this release of the installer

    * Improved support for Live-CD installation media (much faster and
      more reliable than earlier releases);

    * Support for some NAS devices based on Marvell's ARM-compatible
      Orion chip:
          o QNAP TS-109/TS-209 and TS-409;
          o HP Media Vault mv2120;
          o Buffalo Kurobox Pro;
    * Installer images for Netwinder have been added again;
    * Installer images for i386 Xen guests[2]
    * Support for hardware speech synthesis (speakup) has been added;
    * Upgrade of packages early in pkgsel, for example to get
      available security updates for base system packages;
    * Support for loading firmware from (removable) media during the
      installation;
    * i386/amd64: support for installing to and loading firmware from
      MMC/SD cards;
    * New translations: Welsh, Irish, Northern Sami, Serbian (Amharic
      and Marathi were added in beta releases).

Known issues in this release
(Continue reading)

Permalink | Reply | 3 comments |
headers
Andreas Tille | 10 Nov 10:25
Favicon

Announcement: Debian Pure Blends news


Hello,

for those who might wander what the term Debian Pure Blends means: the
Custom Debian Distributions now are called Debian Pure Blends - see below
for further information.

Here comes an update what was done since the beginning of this year
which might be interesting for several projects.

Web-Tools
---------

I'm proud to announce a new QA tool for all CDD^W Blends: Overview about
all bugs about Dependencies of our metapackages.  For the impatient here
is a list of these pages:

  Debian Edu:     http://cdd.alioth.debian.org/edu/bugs
  Debian GIS:     http://cdd.alioth.debian.org/gis/bugs
  Debian Jr:      http://cdd.alioth.debian.org/junior/bugs
  Debian Med:     http://debian-med.alioth.debian.org/bugs
  Debian Science: http://cdd.alioth.debian.org/science/bugs

You can read more about the estimation of tasks status of the bugs at
the Blends/BugPages wiki page[1].

Not that new are the so called tasks pages which are listing the packages
in focus of a Blend as well as those projects which are not yet packaged
but might be intersting - so called "prospective packages".  Here are
links to the relevant tasks pages:
(Continue reading)

Permalink | Reply | 22 comments |
headers
Christian Perrier | 8 Nov 15:45
Favicon
Gravatar

Debconf 8 internationalization sessions report

During Debconf 8, we handled four work sessions around
internationalization as well as more informal work around i18n
infrastructure.

This long-overdue report summarizes the discussions during these
meetings as well as other i18n-related work that happened during
Debcamp and Debconf.

Please accept our apologies for us being very late sending this.

===============================================================
During Debconf 8, a lot of work happened around i18n, either during Debcamp,
informal sessions during Debconf and four formal 1-hour sessions.

i18n work session 1: infrastructure
-----------------------------------

During that work session, several contributors of Debian i18n
presented the recent progress about i18n infrastructure in Debian, 
mostly the dedicated server named "churro", aka i18n.debian.net.

churro is hosted in Merida, Extremadura, Spain, since September 2006, the
first i18n session held in Extremadura.

Since then, several services were developed on churro (see
http://i18n.debian.net/wiki):

Nicolas François summarized the work around l10n material collection.
Several scripts on churro gather the translation material and process it to
provide:
(Continue reading)

Permalink | Reply | 1 comment |
headers
Pierre Habouzit | 30 Oct 17:38
X-Face
Favicon
Gravatar

For those who care about bts-link: call for adoption

Hi,

As some of you may know, I've been the original creator of bts-link[0].
Though, I have currently neither the motivation, nor the time to
maintain it, or run it on a regular basis[1].

I believe bts-link has become an important piece of our infrastructure,
especially for packagers with huge user base, but not only. This is why
it's more than time that I give bts-link to people that have the time to
care about the beast.

Anyways, the information is: I don't intend to maintain or run bts-link
anymore[2], it is up for adoption. If the BTS people wish to inherit the
beast they come first, but any motivated group of people are welcomed.

I believe that the most important things right now would be:

  * make it an official Debian service (running from a Debian.org host)
    so that one can lift some specific bans that bug trackers
    maintainers over the world impose to crawlers ;

  * make the code base better so that one can have a comprehensive list
    of bugs that bts-link cannot get a status for, which it doesn't
    right now. In particular it means that if an upstream bugzilla moves
    or something, it gets completely unnoticed right now ;

  * maintain the code base, add support for new bugtrackers, ...

Cheers,
(Continue reading)

Permalink | Reply | 10 comments |
headers
Joerg Jaspert | 22 Oct 23:32
Favicon

Developer Status

Developer Status
================

Summary of this post
--------------------
  Discussions in the past have made it clear that the current
  definition of "Debian Developer" (AKA someone who is a member of the
  Debian project) should be modified and made more flexible.  There
  have been attempts in the past to do something similar, notably
  Debian Maintainers (DM) [GR-DM], and to some extent
  debian-community.org [D-C], but these have only addressed parts of
  the whole issue.

  We plan to integrate DM more closely into the NM process/system
  while keeping the spirit of easing entry into Debian for newcomers.
  At the same time we add a separate track for less-technical
  contributors.

If you are an existing Debian Developer or Debian Maintainer, don't be
afraid, we are not going to take anything away from you.

Currently becoming a Debian Developer means passing through all of the
New Maintainer process. People that passed this get the @debian.org
mail-forwarding, an account on all (developer-accessible) Debian
machines, voting and upload rights. It is a process that requires
work from prospective Developers, and depending on their available time
and the effort put into it, it can take a bit of time.

Some time ago a few Developers thus went and pushed forward the
"Debian Maintainer" status.  DM allows newcomers to upload their
(Continue reading)

Permalink | Reply | 130 comments |
headers
Josselin Mouette | 21 Oct 13:41
Favicon

Bug Sprint - Oct 25 to Oct 30 - Register and eat cookies

Dear developers,

we are currently very close to release lenny which is most likely going
to be absolutely awesome.

However, there are currently around 100 RC bugs remaining that stand
between us and this release. In the permanent BSP state that has lasted
for quite some time, people seem to lose focus on this urgent need for
the release and the most motivated people are losing motivation after
this marathon.

Hence the idea of the bug sprint.

    100 developers × 5 days = 100 RC bugs closed

100 developers will be working during 5 days and each of them will
commit to close a RC bug that will be assigned to him.

Fixing a RC bug means either of:
      * Uploading a NMU that fixes the bug to unstable. 
      * Convincing, with a mail that details the rationale, a release
        manager to tag the bug lenny-ignore. 
      * Convincing, in a similar way, a release manager to remove the
        package from lenny. 

The one who Fixes a RC bug that is more than 3 months old by writing a
patch shall become a WINNER. WINNERs and release managers will be
eligible to receive home-made cookies from volunteers and from those who
are not able to fix their RC bug in 5 days.
(Continue reading)

Permalink | Reply | 13 comments |
headers
Steve McIntyre | 15 Oct 01:19
Favicon

Bits from the Debian CD team

Hi folks,

It's probably time for a quick update on what we've been up to
lately in terms of producing Debian CD and DVD and (!) BD images.

That will give the game away for the biggest change that has happened
lately - we're now producing some Blu-ray images alongside the
existing CD and DVD images with each weekly Lenny build. As a standard
Blu-ray disc will hold up to 25GB of data, that means that, for the
first time in several years, users should be able to fit all of the
packages for one architecture on a single disc. Woo!

The downside of adding yet another image type is that potentially we
could use up huge amounts more disk space and bandwidth on our central
servers and our mirrors to accommodate them. What I've done,
therefore, is start imposing limits on which images we will produce
each week and with Lenny when it ships. What we now have is (in
increasing order of size):

 * Business card and netinst CDs for all architectures (except s390),
   available for download as ISO, torrent and jigdo. As for Etch,
   we'll also have 2 multi-arch netinst CDs (i386/amd64/powerpc and
   alpha/hppa/ia64).

 * Full CD sets for all architectures:
   + i386, amd64 and source will all be available for download as ISO,
     torrent and jigdo
   + for powerpc we will create ISOs/torrents for the first 8 CDs
     only (with the rest as jigdo)
   + for other architectures we'll have ISOs/torrents for the first 3
(Continue reading)

Permalink | Reply | 10 comments |
headers
Ben Armstrong | 13 Oct 19:31

Bits from the Debian Eee PC team, autumn 2008

Also posted as http://syn.theti.ca/2008/10/13/

   Some brief highlights of the last three months of Debian Eee PC
   development.

Thermal and ACPI breakage resolved in 2.6.26-7

   We're pleased to see that in the upload to Sid of
   linux-image-2.6.26-1-686 version 2.6.26-7, the pair of [1]2.6.26 bugs
   we've been tracking that have made it difficult for Eee users to
   upgrade their systems have been resolved. Since then 2.6.26-8 has
   been uploaded and is expected to enter Lenny this week due to a
   freeze exception. Once the new kernel has migrated we will move
   quickly to build and release a new installer that includes it.

Ath5k wifi works on Eee PC in Linux 2.6.27

   Jean-Christophe reports that [2]ath5k works in Linux 2.6.27 on
   the Eee PC 701, and just needs a [3]small patch to work with our
   eeepc-acpi-scripts package. This is good news for those of us with
   models 701, 900, 900A and 1000HD who have been wanting to get off of
   the non-free Madwifi drivers and onto DFSG free drivers.

New Eee PC model 701SD wifi support in the works

   Users of the new Eee PC Model [4]701SD have just started showing up
   looking for support in mainstream Linux distros. Martin Filtenborg
   confirmed using our [5]Eee PC Live image with the GPL'd rtl8187se
   driver from Realtek to demonstrate that we can at least use it to
   connect to an unencrypted AP, get an IP address and ping other hosts.
(Continue reading)

Permalink | Reply | 3 comments |
headers
Christian Perrier | 12 Oct 16:09
Favicon
Gravatar

Debian bugs #600000 and #1000000 contest

As the bug #500000 mark was turned on September 24th 2008, Debian
developers and contributors need a new challenge.

So, again, a small contest has been set up. The principle is very
simple: please place a bet (one per person) about the day bugs #600000
and #1000000 will be reported. 

The winner(s) will be the person(s) placing her|his|their bet as close
as possible to the real moment bug #600000 and #1000000 are reported.

There is nothing to win but the pride of being the person who
predicted our bug report rate for the next months|years, just what
René Mayorga won by winning the bug #500000 prediction game
(http://people.debian.org/~bubulle/500000.html).

The bet page is a wiki page: http://wiki.debian.org/600000thBugContest

It will be closed on November 30th 2008. Bets will be kept statically
until bug #600000 is reported.

Then the page will be reopened with a new list of bets for bug
#1000000.  Thus, we will have four sets of bets for bug #1000000 with
even more suspense and fun!.

Enjoy...

--

--
Permalink | Reply | 0 comments |

Gmane