Debian News

• Interesting software updates:
  • KOffice 2.1 in experimental.
  • munin 1.4.0 beta 1 in experimental.
  • inkscape 0.47 is out. You can find the 4th prerelease (0.47pre4) in unstable.
• Sandro Tosi blogged about the latest release of reportbug 4.9.
• The FD and DAM teams have met this weekend (summary mail in d-d-a). From now on, the NM advocate emails will be public.
• Help is wanted with the Debian GPG keysigning coordination pages. Contact the NM FrontDesk if you are interested.
• The BSP season has started. This weekend some people gathered in Cambridge and Munich to fix bugs (and drink beer). Anyway, you can have your own BSP every week, congratulations to zack for 12 weeks of RCBW! (RCBW stands for Release critical bugs of the week).

There are 67 new packages in the Debian archive,4 were uploaded to experimental and 63 were uploaded to unstable:

Continue reading…

The following packages have been orphaned and are looking for a new maintainer:

• O: zope-formulator — tool to create and validate web forms in zope
• O: gcipher — A simple “encryption” tool
• O: libesmtp — LibESMTP SMTP client library
• O: libgcgi — library for CGI programs in C
• O: gift — interface library for giFT and protocol plugins
• O: gift-openft — giFT plugin for the OpenFT network
• O: gnomad2 — Manage a Creative Labs Nomad Jukebox
• O: python-bzutils — Python module to interact with bugzilla servers
• O: bug-triage — Bug triaging and forwarding tool
• O: herrie — Minimalistic audio player built upon Ncurses
• O: twistedsnmp — Event driven digital circuit simulator with Tcl/Tk
• O: snowdrop — plain text watermarking and watermark recovery
• O: libspiff — library to read/write XSPF, the XML Shareable Playlist Format
• O: pam-devperm — PAM module to change device ownership on login
• O: mozplugger — Plugin allowing external viewers to be launched inside Mozilla
• O: mtink — Status monitor tool for Epson inkjet printers

Somebody asked for the following software to be packaged in Debian:

• RFP: python-pylibmc — Python libmemcached wrapper
• RFP: afsp — utility for read, copy, write, compare, filter and resampling audio files
• RFP: videoconverter — easily convert videos to several popular video sharing sites
• RFP: notmuch — tag and search based email with CLI interface and Emacs front end
• RFP: posix-utils
• RFP: simplesamlphp — A PHP implementation of SAML 2.0 service provider and identity provider
• RFP: callweaver — Free PABX
• RFP: pyclutter-gtk — Open GL based interactive canvas library GTK+ widget – Python bindings
• RFP: pyclutter-gst — Open GL based interactive canvas library GStreamer elements – Python bindings

You can read more information about how to help at Work-Needing and Prospective Packages page.

• TeX Live 2009 has been uploaded to experimental due the high amount of internal changes. See texlive-base 2009-1 changelog for more information.
• The new release of mercurial 1.4 is in unstable. (changelog)
• Also, for those packaging with mercurial, Jens Peter Secher has made a rewrite of hg-buildpackage (orphaned for some time now) named mercurial-buildpackage. More information about mercurial-buildpackage’s features in this email.
• lenny-and-a-half was not planned due the initial freeze plans in December. Now that the freeze has been set in March, there is some discussion about reviving it, help is needed!
• Raphaël Hertzog announced that now the new source package formats has been available for some weeks, it is time to think about making it the default format. There is a release goal about this and about 100 bugs need to be fixed.
  More information about how to convert your packages to the new source format is available in this wikipage and in the dpkg-source(1) man page (SOURCE PACKAGE FORMATS paragraph).

There are 70 new packages in the Debian archive, 2 were uploaded to experimental and 68 were uploaded to unstable:

Continue reading…

The following packages have been orphaned and are looking for a new maintainer:

• O: gnats — The GNU problem report management system (client tools)
• O: gnatsweb — Web interface to GNU GNATS
• O: libdiscid — Library for creating MusicBrainz DiscIDs
• O: libmusicbrainz-2.1 — C/C++ client library for the MusicBrainz web service
• O: lrzsz — tools for zmodem/xmodem/ymodem file transfer

The following packages are requesting co-maintainers:

• RFH: link-grammar — Carnegie Mellon University’s link grammar parser for English

Somebody asked for the following software to be packaged in Debian:

• RFP: ptouch-driver — CUPS/Foomatic driver for Brother P-touch label printers
• RFP: gitit — A wiki backed by a git or darcs filestore
• RFP: xul-ext-weave — Syncronize personal data between Mozilla browsers
• RFP: python-couchdbkit — python bindings for the Couchdbkit framework
• RFP: libjna-posix-java — basic POSIX-like functions for Java
• RFP: Radiusplugin — openvpn plugin for authentication and accounting against a RADIUS server
• RFP: kcoloredit — a color palette editor and color picker for KDE
• RFP: colortail — watch logs with coloring

You can read more information about how to help at Work-Needing and Prospective Packages page.

No new packages were accepted in the Debian archive last week.

• Bradley Smith blogged about the status of the AVR32 Debian port.
• Bill Allombert has submited a general resolution proposal “AGPL does not meet the DFSG”.
• Marco d’Itri informed that due to changes in udev 147, squeeze will not support kernels earlier than 2.6.27.
• Kumar Appaiah sent a summary about the status of the Python 2.6 transition.
• Iceape is not dead!. Mike Hommey has uploaded the version 2.0 to unstable. (huge changelog). Mike also blogged about packages that are only compatible with Iceape 1.x and will stop working.
• There is a new Debian Financial Partners page available in the Debian website.

The following packages have been orphaned and are looking for a new maintainer:

• O: xchain — A strategy game for 2-4 players
• O: cdtool — text-based audio CD player and CD-ROM control commands
• O: googlizer — utility to search Google via your GNOME menu/panel
• O: xsol — a solitaire game for the X Windows system
• O: p2c — Pascal to C translator
• O: wmgtemp — Temperature sensor dockapp for Window Maker
• O: wmmount — miniature mount utility and free space monitoring tool
• O: xdemorse — GTK+ Morse Code Decoding Software
• O: xdx — DX-cluster tcp/ip client for amateur radio
• O: sitemap — Makes an HTML site map from meta tags from other
• O: xlog — GTK+ Logging program for Hamradio Operators
• O: xlog — GTK+ Logging program for Hamradio Operators
• O: xnec2c — calculate and display radio antenna properties
• O: xtlf — single user (single node) version of tlf
• O: xwota — GTK client to the WOTA Database
• O: yagiuda — software to analyse performance of Yagi-Uda antennas
• O: specimen — a MIDI controllable audio sampler for GNU/Linux systems
• O: drbdlinks — Manages symlinks into a shared DRBD partition
• O: libmng — Multiple-image Network Graphics library

The following packages have been put up for adoption by the current maintainers:

• RFA: eclipse-cdt — C/C++ Development Tools for Eclipse

Somebody asked for the following software to be packaged in Debian:

• RFP: google-glog — application-level logging APIs based on C++-style
• RFP: dita-ot — transforms DITA content (maps and topics) into deliverable formats

You can read more information about how to help at Work-Needing and Prospective Packages page.

No new packages were accepted in the Debian archive last week. This is not bad news, it was disabled because important changes are coming. You can read more at the Bits from the ftp-team.