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LCA: The state of Debian

The Debian miniconf is one of the oldest of linux.conf.au traditions. This year, Martin Krafft was the person who - with short notice - got to lead off this gathering with the "state of Debian" talk. Debian, as always, is an active project, and it seems that much is going well.

The Debian security team has grown over the last year. Martin noted that Debian, for all practical purposes, had no security support for a period after the Etch Sarge release. Those days are over, though, and Debian's security support is, once again, solid. There is now good security support for the testing distribution as well; in fact, testing updates often come out before those for the stable distribution. That result comes from the fact that testing updates do not need to support all architectures and there are fewer embargo issues.

The upcoming Lenny release, it was noted, will have implemented most of the features called for in the security-hardening specification.

The state of translations is good; Debian supports 58 languages now, and may support 77 by the Lenny release. The Smith Review Project has been working through the package base, ensuring that package descriptions are, well, descriptive, in proper English, and easily translatable.

On the ports side, the Sparc32 port has been officially retired; to the dismay of relatively few users. The Lenny release will include a new port: Debian GNU/kFreeBSD, which is based on the FreeBSD kernel. Martin thought this port would appeal to those Debian users who have been complaining about the increasing "multimedia orientation" of the Linux-based distribution.

Much work is going into making the package repository more searchable. The debtags project, which is putting a set of standardized tags onto packages, is relatively advanced. This effort will address a number of longstanding problems, like the fact that a search for "image editor" does not turn up GIMP, which is an "image manipulation program." Debtags will also make it possible to search for packages which are related to other packages. There is also the apt-xapian-index project, which is working toward indexing all package metadata and providing a fast search capability.

Other bits of current status:

• The debian-med project - building a version of Debian aimed at the medical industry - is headed toward a 1.0 release.

• The Debian mirror network is growing. There are six new primary mirrors, and around 100 new secondary mirrors.

• Lenny will use UTF-8 nearly exclusively. Developers are working on fixing the remaining packages which do not yet support UTF-8.

• The venerable dselect is almost retired. There are still dselect users out there; Martin suggests that all of those folks move to aptitude.

• There are a lot of new games coming into the distribution.

• The Etch-and-a-half release will be happening soon. This is a version of Etch which offers a 2.6.24 kernel - needed to make Etch work on newer hardware. The original 2.6.18 kernel will remain an option for Etch users.

Looking forward to 2008, Martin noted that the Lenny release is currently planned for December. Lots of emphasis on "planned" - given Debian's history in this regard, few people actually expect the release to happen on time. Martin did say that things have been getting better in this regard, with Etch being "only" four months behind schedule. A Lenny release which is only a couple months late seems feasible.

Something which is just coming into play is the new "Debian maintainer" status. Unlike full developers, maintainers cannot vote, have no access to the debian-private list, and do not have much access to the wider Debian infrastructure. About all they really can do is upload a specific set of packages. So the "maintainer" designation is good for those who want to maintain a small set of packages, but who are not looking to be an active participant in Debian as a whole, and who do not want to run the "new maintainer" gauntlet.

Martin was asked whether there was any thought of downgrading any existing developers to maintainers. He said that there was some interest in doing that. There are currently just over 1000 developers, all of whom have full access to the repository. Some 400 of those are inactive, but they still possess a key which lets them make changes to the system; this is a clear security issue. The MIA project is looking to identify these people and, eventually, move them to inactive status. On the issue of whether the project would be forcibly downgrading active developers who, for whatever reason, are not entirely welcome in the community, Martin says that will not be happening. There is just no way to do it without bringing massive disruption and flame wars, and nobody wants that.

There was also a question on the role of the debian-private list. The biggest use of debian-private, according to Martin, is vacation announcements; developers need to let the project know that they will not be around, but they do not wish to announce their absence to the wider world. There are some other discussions there too, of course. Current policy says that debian-private discussions will be disclosed after three years in the absence of a request to the contrary. There's an effort afoot to disclose older traffic from before the adoption of that policy, but that requires the assent of all of the participants.

The debian-women project, unfortunately, is currently stalled; the main participants have not had the time to push things forward. The #debian-women channel remains active, though, and is generally a nice and supportive place to be. There are currently about twelve active female contributors to Debian. Martin thinks that women are becoming more present in general, though, and he stated that "the Debian cowboy days are done."

On the packaging front: the packages.qa.debian.org site has been redone in "beautiful CSS." There are now RSS feeds for those who want to follow the status of specific packages. A new "LowThresholdNMU" flag has been added; this is essentially a statement on the part of the maintainer that he will not get offended if others upload fixes to the package. Packages can now use bzip2 compression. There has also been a major rework of the shared library infrastructure, which now looks at actual symbol use when determining shared library dependencies. This change should make it possible to install individual packages from testing into a stable system without having to update all of the libraries that package uses.

There is a growing trend toward team maintenance, especially for the larger package sets. This approach increases the robustness of the system and minimizes problems with MIA maintainers.

Version control systems are working their way into the Debian infrastructure. Packages can now have a set of Vcs-* headers which point to the upstream source repository; these can be used, for example, with the debcheckout command to clone the source repository without having to know anything about the source management system used. Version control systems also offer a solution to the current problem of "hackish packaging tools" being used by many developers. In the future, source packages might just include a shallow repository which can be fed straight to git (or some other system). This project is stalled at the moment, but Martin thinks it will go somewhere; it would be nice if the distributors could come up with a common scheme that they can all use.

The final topic in this session was a question from the audience on whether Debian might ever go to a shorter release cycle. The projected 18 months for Lenny seems like a step in that direction, but 18 months is still quite a bit longer than the cycles used by many other free distributions. Martin thinks that going shorter is unlikely. The fact of the matter is that distribution upgrades are a hassle, requiring a fair amount of administrative attention. Ubuntu may have made some progress with its use of upgrade scripts, but the basic problem remains. On top of that, shorter release cycles would necessarily lead to a shortening of the time for which security updates are available for any specific release. And that, in turn, would force users into more frequent updates whether they want to do that or not. So one should not expect six-month release cycles from Debian anytime soon.

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New Releases

Mandriva Linux 2008 Spring Beta 1 "Ophrys" released

The first beta of Mandriva Linux 2008.1 has been released. "The third pre-release of Mandriva Linux 2008 Spring is here. This pre-release brings available KDE 4.0.0 final (in the repositories, not on the discs), a new XML-based package metainformation system, out-of-the-box support for multimedia keys on many common keyboards, new NVIDIA and ATI drivers, kernel 2.6.24 RC8 (with ALSA 1.0.16 RC1), and more."

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Fedora Unity releases updated Fedora 7 Re-Spins

The Fedora Unity Project has announced the release of new ISO Re-Spins (DVD and CD Sets) of Fedora 7. These Re-Spin ISOs are based on Fedora 7 and all updates released as of January 18th, 2008. The ISO images are available for i386, x86_64 and PPC architectures via jigdo. CD Image sets have been made available for those in the Fedora community that do not have DVD drives or burners available.

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Distribution News

Debian GNU/Linux

preparing sid/lenny to build with GCC-4.3

Matthias Klose reports that GCC-4.3 will be the default compiler for the Lenny release. "Other distributions (Fedora and Novell) are currently preparing their next releases based on the GCC-4.3 compilers, and are heavily involved in upstream development. Test rebuilds for Ubuntu gutsy and hardy were made for amd64, i386, and sparc. On Debian one or more test rebuilds were made for alpha, hppa, i386, ia64, amd64, sparc. In short, 4.3 will become a good release."

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Introducing security hardening features for Lenny

Moritz Muehlenhof introduces the security hardening measures that are going into all the packages in Lenny (currently testing).

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Fedora

The Red Hat Community Architecture team

Outgoing Fedora leader Max Spevack has sent out a somewhat indirect announcement for the creation of the Red Hat Community Architecture Team, which is intended to help strengthen Red Hat's position within the community. "The Community Architecture team is responsible for all of Red Hat's community efforts, and to achieve its goals by encouraging and developing new leadership within the Fedora community. By its nature, most of this work will take place directly in Fedora, and therefore we 'report' to the Fedora Board, but we will also be responsible for community related activities that are within Red Hat's scope, but outside of Fedora's."

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FUDCon video: New face of Fedora

Red Hat Magazine has made a video available for download. The video shows outgoing Fedora Project leader Max Spevack talking with new Fedora Project leader Paul Frields at FUDCon.

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And the F9 codename winner is...

The codename for Fedora 9 is Sulphur. Click below to see the full election results.

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Fedora Education Spin

There is a kickstart file available to create Fedora live CD with educational applications. So far, this is an unofficial spin and the package list is still in flux.

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Gentoo Linux

Gentoo plans public beta release for 2008.0 release cycle

The Gentoo Project is planning a public beta for the 2008.0 release cycle. "Public beta releases play a major role in the Release Engineering team's revamped plans for 2008.0. Releng lead Chris Gianelloni said he hoped beta releases would increase community participation as well as the quality of the final release. These feature-complete public betas will require the earlier development of release materials, another component of the 2008.0 changes. To ensure sufficient time for beta testing, a mandatory 2-week testing period will follow the beta release." The 2.6.24 kernel is targeted for the 2008.0 release.

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SUSE Linux and openSUSE

openSUSE 10.3 PromoDVDs

Promotional DVDs of openSUSE 10.3 are available. "The DVD is made to promote openSUSE, especially on exhibitions and other events, local usergroups, schools, universities and so on." Click below to find out how to get some.

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Other distributions

CentOS Projects (Planet CentOS)

Daniël de Kok takes a look at some CentOS subprojects. These include the CentOS Live CD, Project Cranberry (a sysadmin toolkit), Dasha (bringing in more drivers), and Pandora (a package browser for CentOS repositories).

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CentOS Artwork SIG created

The CentOS team has created the Artwork Special Interest Group (SIG). This SIG will create artwork for each CentOS major release and create and maintain consistent artwork for the official CentOS websites.

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New Distributions

EeeDora

EeeDora provides a Fedora 8 spin for the Asus Eee 701 PC. From the project's Google Code page: "This project includes the files necessary to build a custom spin of Fedora (using their excellent tools), put it onto a CD (or USB key) as a Live version to test it out, and then install it as a replacement for the Asus default."

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Distribution Newsletters

Fedora Weekly News Issue 117

The most recent issue of Fedora Weekly News is available. Coverage includes the Fedora 9 codename winner (Sulphur for the impatient), a FUDcon survey (both for those who attended and those who didn't), coding project ideas for various Summer of Code style initiatives, Tom "spot" Callaway's new role, and more. Click below for the full issue.

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Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter #75

The Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter for the weeks January 20th - January 26th, 2008 covers the upcoming Alpha 4 freeze, the release of 6.06.2 LTS, MOTU Council elections, an Ubuntu Demo Day in Swindon, UK, upcoming Hug Day, Full Circle Magazine #9, the Launchpad logo competition, and much more.

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DistroWatch Weekly, Issue 237

The DistroWatch Weekly for January 28, 2008 is out. "Mobile workers no longer have to carry bulky laptops in order to do their work; with the emergence of free software and live operating systems, a bootable USB Flash drive with Linux is often all that's needed to complete one's task while on the road. In this week's issue we'll take a quick look at Mandriva Flash 2008, a useful "pocket" OS with thousands of applications and several gigabytes of free space for storing your data. In the news section, Gentoo Linux works hard to improve the interaction between the developers and its users, Debian embarks on a major switch to GCC 4.3 as the default compiler, Fedora announces more changes to the project leadership prior to the upcoming release of Fedora 9, and ISP-Planet talks to m0n0wall's Manual Kasper about the importance of small, configurable firewalls. Finally, don't miss the usual bunch of new Linux distributions submitted to DistroWatch, including the promising openmamba GNU/Linux."

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Newsletters and articles of interest

Tweaking Hidden Ubuntu Settings With Ubuntu Tweak (HowtoForge)

HowtoForge looks at the Ubuntu Tweak package. "Ubuntu Tweak is a tool that lets you change hidden Ubuntu settings, for example: hide or change the splash screen, show or hide the Computer, Home, Trash, and Network icons, change Metacity, Nautilus, power management, and security settings, etc. Currently Ubuntu Tweak is available only for the Ubuntu GNOME desktop, i.e., it will not work on Kubuntu or Xubuntu. This short guide shows how to install and use Ubuntu Tweak."

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Interviews

Interview with RPM Fusion developers

Over at the Fedora wiki, Jonathan Roberts interviews the developers of the RPM Fusion repository. "Hans de Goede: We want to be a one stop place for Fedora add-on packages which cannot be in Fedora proper due to various issues. Currently we are a merger of the dribble, freshrpms and livna repositories, and we invite other repositories to join us."

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