Weekly Edition
Return to the Distributions pageSponsored link
Vyatta –
Linux & Open Source
Alternative to Cisco –
Advanced Routing,
Firewall, VPN, QoS..
Free Download ->
| |||||||||||||
Gentoo Weekly Newsletter - Volume 3, Issue 2
--------------------------------------------------------------------------- Gentoo Weekly Newsletter http://www.gentoo.org/news/en/gwn/current.xml This is the Gentoo Weekly Newsletter for the week of January 12th, 2004. --------------------------------------------------------------------------- ============== 1. Gentoo News ============== Summary ------- * 2003 Gentoo Bug Hunt Winners 2003 Gentoo Bug Hunt Winners ---------------------------- The 2003 Gentoo Bug Hunt has come to a close. Here are the winners, who are developers who have closed the most bugs in the last quarter of 2003 (in order): * Mike Frysinger[1], with 672 bugs closed * Martin Holzer[2], with 565 bugs closed * Heinrich Wendel[3], with 480 bugs closed * Caleb Tennis[4], with 277 bugs closed * Michael Sterett[5], with 192 bugs closed * Markus Nigbur[6], with 180 bugs closed * Marinus Schraal[7], with 179 bugs closed 1. vapier@gentoo.org 2. mholzer@gentoo.org 3. lanius@gentoo.org 4. caleb@gentoo.org 5. mr_bones_@gentoo.org 6. pYrania@gentoo.org 7. foser@gentoo.org In addition, the following developers receive an honorable mention for their great bug stomping efforts: * Seemant Kulleen[8], with 161 bugs closed * Marius Mauch[9], with 160 bugs closed * Brad House[10], with 160 bugs closed * Sven Vermeulen[11], with 158 bugs closed * Nicholas Jones[12], 156 bugs closed * Robin Johnson[13], with 153 bugs closed * Tim Yamin[14], with 145 bugs closed * Alastair Tse[15], with 138 bugs closed * Mike Gardiner[16], with 111 bugs closed * Martin Schlemmer[17], with 108 bugs closed * Paul de Vrieze[18], with 93 bugs closed * Donnie Berkholz[19], with 84 bugs closed 8. seemant@gentoo.org 9. genone@gentoo.org 10. brad_mssw@gentoo.org 11. swift@gentoo.org 12. carpaski@gentoo.org 13. robbat2@gentoo.org 14. plasmaroo@gentoo.org 15. liquidx@gentoo.org 16. obz@gentoo.org 17. azarah@gentoo.org 18. pauldv@gentoo.org 19. spyderous@gentoo.org And last but not least, non-developer bug janitor Andrew Cooks had an impressive showing easily worth an honorable mention: he closed 100 bugs. If you are one of the winners or have received an honorable mention, please contact Daniel Robbins[20] and make sure that he has your mailing address. If you're a winner, then we need to determine what hardware you should receive. Daniel has decided not to purchase the prize hardware components in advance so that winners can suggest or request components they may need. 20. drobbins@gentoo.org Thank you everyone (not just those mentioned here) for your efforts to make Gentoo better for everyone! :) ================================= 2. Featured Developer of the Week ================================= Olivier Cr??te Figure 2.1: Olivier Cr??te http://www.gentoo.org/images/gwn/20040112_tester.jpg This week, we are featuring Olivier Cr??te[21] (tester), a Montr??al resident who is currently spending a year in Europe. Olivier is on the AMD64 project, maintains a few packages that would otherwise have been abandoned, and is working on some of the Adelie Linux[22] clustering enhancements to Gentoo. He is also co-maintainer of GnomeICU[23], a Gnome-based ICQ client. 21. tester@gentoo.org 22. http://www.adelielinux.com 23. http://gnomeicu.sourceforge.net/index.php Olivier has been using Linux since 1997, progressing from RedHat 4.2 through 7.3 before the brand-new laptop he acquired in early-2002 caused him to look around for a distro that could be optimized for his new hardware. He has been on Gentoo ever since, largely because he "found the Gentoo forums to be really helpful, and the Gentoo community was wonderful". The next summer, he was employed at Cyberlogic[24], a Montreal company providing computers and support services, including clustering. One of the projects he worked on there was Adelie Linux,using Gentoo as the foundation for clustering, including AMD Opteron-based clusters. Cyberlogic was very supportive of their staff pursuing an AMD64 version of Gentoo, and Olivier worked with Daniel Robbins[25] and others to start making it a reality. In particular, Olivier noted that Brad House[26], the current Gentoo AMD64 Project[27] lead, "is doing a tremendous job and the AMD64 port would not be anywhere near where it is without his contribution." 24. http://www.cyberlogic.ca/ 25. drobbins@gentoo.org 26. brad_mssw@gentoo.org 27. http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/base/amd64/index.xml A third-year Software Engineering Student at the Canadian ??cole Polytechnique de Montr??al[28], Olivier is currently studying as an exchange student at the ??cole Nationale Sup??rieure d'Informatique et de Math??matiques Appliqu??es de Grenoble (ENSIMAG)[29] in France He enjoys traveling, and you can read about his adventures (in French) on his blog[30]. He is currently working on a Dell Inspiron Laptop, and (as a Gnome Developer) he uses Gnome[31] 2.4. He recently abandoned Pine[32] in favor of Evolution[33] for email, and counts Mozilla Firebird[34], xchat[35], Gossip[36], Amsn[37] and aterm[38] among his most oft-used applications. Democratically, he uses GNU Emacs[39] for development, and vi[40] for general editing. 28. http://polymtl.ca/ 29. http://www.ensimag.fr/ 30. http://www.tester.ca/ 31. http://www.gnome.org/ 32. http://www.washington.edu/pine/ 33. http://www.ximian.com/products/evolution/ 34. http://www.mozilla.org/products/firebird/ 35. http://www.xchat.org/ 36. http://gossip.imendio.org/ 37. http://amsn.sourceforge.net/ 38. http://aterm.sourceforge.net/ 39. http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/emacs.html 40. http://www.guckes.net/vi/index.php3 Olivier closed our correspondence with the following observation: "What I really like about Gentoo is not only that its a great distribution from a technical point of view, but that it has a great community. The life and blood of a Free Software project is in its community, and Gentoo has one of the best communities that I have been part of." His favorite quote was from Henry Spencer: "Those who do not understand Unix are condemned to reinvent it, poorly." ================== 3. Gentoo Security ================== GLSA: Linux kernel do_mremap() privilege escalation vulnerability ----------------------------------------------------------------- A critical security vulnerability has been found in recent Linux kernels which allows for local privilege escalation. Arbitrary code may be able to exploit this vulnerability and may disrupt the operation of other parts of the kernel memory management subroutines finally leading to unexpected behavior. Since no special privileges are required to use the mremap() system call any process may misuse its unexpected behavior to disrupt the kernel memory management subsystem. Proper exploitation of this vulnerability may lead to local privilege escalation including execution of arbitrary code with kernel level access. Proof-of-concept exploit code has been created and successfully tested, permitting root escalation on vulnerable systems. As a result, all users should upgrade their kernels to new or patched versions. There is no temporary workaround - a kernel upgrade is required. A list of unaffected kernels is provided in the GLSA announcement[41]. 41. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.linux.gentoo.announce/279 * Severity: High * Packages Affected: see GLSA announcement[42] * Rectification: emerge sync; emerge -pv your-favorite-sources; emerge your-favorite-sources; follow usual procedures for compiling and installing a kernel. * GLSA Announcement[43] 42. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.linux.gentoo.announce/279 43. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.linux.gentoo.announce/279 ========================= 4. Heard in the Community ========================= Web Forums ---------- Greet the Repoman Genone[44] is among those Gentoo developers with more than just occasional guest appearances in the Forums. Last week he put up a post describing the characteristics of an upcoming Portage version 2.0.50, which has quickly developed in a lively thread discussing the advantages of new and improved features, but also points out possible hickups other tools like etcat might run into if they're used in conjunction with the new Portage: 44. http://forums.gentoo.org/profile.php?mode=viewprofile&u=16314 * What to expect from portage-2.0.50[45] 45. http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic.php?t=121499 Stuck Between An ~ARCH and A Hard Place For the moderators, the sudden outbreak of complaints about kdelibs-3.1.4 compiles ending rather abruptly on peculiar error messages was hard to contain, particularly because many people seem to panic and forget about the Forum's search function. After a biug @urge of duplicates, only one thread remained alive. Luckily, Gentoo dev Caleb[46] had both that Forum thread and the corresponding bug report[47] in his focus and provided a temporary solution (update autoconf to a release number beyond "x86" stable) within a very decent response time. Anyway, the actual error is on its way out as soon as autoconf-2.58 is bumped to usability for people not living on the bleeding ~x86 edge: 46. http://forums.gentoo.org/profile.php?mode=viewprofile&u=21742 47. http://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=37328 * The big bad kdelibs/kde/autoconf thread of Jan 2004[48] 48. http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic.php?t=120849 gentoo-user ----------- DJBDNS and Gentoo DJBDNS[49] is a popular alternative to the traditional and sometimes buggy BIND[50] package from ISC. This[51] thread covers some basics of getting DJBDNS up and running on Gentoo. 49. http://cr.yp.to/djbdns.html 50. http://www.isc.org/products/BIND/ 51. http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.linux.gentoo.user/60142 Experimental Gentoo 2004 Stages The new Gentoo 2004.0 stages were quietly[52] announced on gentoo-user this week. Download them, and submit bug reports! 52. http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.linux.gentoo.user/60607 The Command Line Editor Thread Finally this week, a more entertaining thread. How many ways can you replace a text string in a bunch of files from the Linux command line? Many[53]. 53. http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.linux.gentoo.user/59700 gentoo-dev ---------- Submitting Ebuilds. Interesting in submitting ebuilds? Want to know a bit more about how developers get to be developers? Feel like finding a bit more about how this whole portage tree thing works when dealing with fun issues like spam, security and screwups? Have a look here[54] and here[55] for a start. 54. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.linux.gentoo.devel/14880/ 55. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.linux.gentoo.devel/14864/ ======================= 5. Gentoo International ======================= Time Out There are certainly things worth noting - if only we knew about them. Please help the GWN team with information about international events, user stories and interesting projects from your own countries! By all means, do send suggestions to gwn-feedback@gentoo.org. =========== 6. Bugzilla =========== Summary ------- * Statistics * Closed Bug Ranking * New Bug Rankings Statistics ---------- The Gentoo community uses Bugzilla (bugs.gentoo.org[56]) to record and track bugs, notifications, suggestions and other interactions with the development team. Between 02 January 2004 and 08 January 2004, activity on the site has resulted in: 56. http://bugs.gentoo.org * 578 new bugs during this period * 322 bugs closed or resolved during this period * 8 previously closed bugs were reopened this period Of the 4590 currently open bugs: 100 are labeled 'blocker', 187 are labeled 'critical', and 331 are labeled 'major'. Closed Bug Rankings ------------------- The developers and teams who have closed the most bugs during this period are: * AMD64 Porting Team[57], with 51 closed bugs[58] * Gentoo Games Team[59], with 30 closed bugs[60] * Net-Mail Packages Team[61], with 14 closed bugs[62] * Daniel Ahlberg[63], with 13 closed bugs[64] * x86 Kernel Team[65], with 10 closed bugs[66] * Sven Vermeulen[67], with 10 closed bugs[68] * Gentoo KDE Team[69], with 10 closed bugs[70] 57. amd64@gentoo.org 58. http://bugs.gentoo.org/buglist.cgi?bug_status=RESOLVED&bug_status=CLOSED& (Log in to post comments)
|
|||||||||||||
