News for Debian developers
This wiki page collects small news that all developers should know but that are not worth a dedicated mail to debian-devel-announce. When we have collected 5 items, we'll send the content of this wiki page to debian-devel-announce. Follow the template "Example of news" and add your news below it. See /Help for more information on how to write entries.
Example of news
This is a sample news. Copy it and edit the title, content and signature... You can use links like this. Put real news below this sample.
-- Your Name
Conversion of source packages to 3.0 (quilt/native)
I requested some new lintian tags related to this transition (see #566820). With the availability of multiple source formats, it's now recommended to always be explicit about the desired source format and thus to always provide a debian/source/format file. When you select the format, you should usually pick either "3.0 (quilt)" or "3.0 (native)" unless you have a reason to continue using the old "1.0" format.
- With the release of Debian 5.0.4, dpkg-dev in stable has been updated to version 1.14.28. Thus it's now possible to use dashes in the "component name" of additional upstream tarballs. Source packages unpacked by dpkg-source from this version are also fully quilt compatible even when quilt is not installed at unpack time. This means that even old buildd — provided that they have installed the latest stable updates — will now cope with usage of quilt in debian/rules.
More than 1000 source packages are already using the new source formats "3.0 (quilt)" and "3.0 (native)". Have you updated your own packages already?
-- Raphaël Hertzog
DEHS now supports format 3.0 source packages
Although support for format 3.0 source packages on DEHS was expected to be added until DEHS2 was released, thanks to a contributed patch they are now supported.
Kudos to Didier Raboud for the patch!
-- Raphael Geissert
userdir-ldap mail gateway updated
db.debian.org's mail gateway has been updated to support the export of ssh keys to only a subset of debian.org machines. This can be done by prepending "allowed_hosts=fqdn1,fqdn2 " to the ssh public key. For more information read the mail gateway instructions.
-- Martin Zobel-Helas
piuparts.d.o
RFH: Help is needed for filing bugs based on the available piuparts logfiles, as well as for fixing them! Currently piuparts has found more then 500 policy violating packages (in more then 19000 binary packages) but only about 60 have been submitted as open bugs, though at the time of writing 28 are serious (usually easy ones, I believe). The bug filing efforts have concentrated on the important policy violations so far.
Patches for the existing bugs filed against piuparts would also be very much appreciated! The BTS has some very nice ideas how to improve piuparts usefulness (and usability) even more!
It is planned to reorganize the piuparts tests being done: at the moment there is a sid test (for installation, removal and purge in sid) and one (called squeeze) that installs the lenny version of the package in lenny, then upgrades to squeeze, removes and purges and then does those tests in squeeze alone. The plan is to switch this to do sid, squeeze and lenny2squeeze, so the same tests but in three (instead of two different) setups. Then the test failure for not so serious policy violations, like files existing after purge, can be disabled for lenny2squeeze and squeeze, and enabled for sid. In the general the tests in sid should be the most pedantic, less pedantic in squeeze and quite relaxed for lenny2squeeze tests. I hope to have this setup ready for when the squeeze freeze begins, ideally earlier.
Until this has happened, if you want to see more packages tested with the current setup, fix "527063 ([shared-mime-info] owned and unowned files after purge)".
As final words, I like to emphasize that this is not about making piuparts happy, but about complying to policy, which will make users happy, as there are real world benefits. Fails to install is an obvious one, but think DEBCONF_FRONTEND=non-interactive also, which is used in millions of automated installs.
-- Holger Levsen
Previous news
If you want to send out a new issue on debian-devel-announce, you can use this helper script to generate the email version of this page.