The news are collected on http://wiki.debi
an.org/DeveloperNews
Please contribute: add important news related to your Debian
work, too.
debhelper v7
------------
debhelper v7 is ready for daring developers to use. In this
version I've
tried to learn some things from cdbs, and the result is a
new "dh"
command which can be used to create debian/rules files that
are as short
as 3 lines for many packages. I hope this will be more
powerful and have
a lower learning curve than cdbs, so give it a try.
-- Joey Hess
Help the DPL
------------
Steve McIntyre, our beloved DPL, has requested help[1] in
handling the CD
build infrastructure. Work is needed on an on-going basis
to handle the
weekly/daily ISO images and also at release time to
generate and test the
final ISO images.
-- Raphaël Hertzog
[1] http://lists.debian.org/debian-cd/2008/04/msg00041.html
New debian-ports.org machine
----------------------------
During the last week-end, debian-ports.org[2] has been
moved to a new
machine, which is faster and has a lot more disk space.
The goal of this machine is to provide an infrastructure
for unofficial
architectures until they are integrated in the main Debian
archive. This
way porters could spend their time porting packages instead
of fighting
with the infrastructure.
It provides:
* a repository to host packages and install CD
* a wanna-build database
* a web interface to the build logs
* a DNS hosting service
* a POP server for build daemons behind NAT
The machine is now capable of accepting new ports,
currently sh4 seems to
be the next one. To accept a new port, we require that a
minimal set of
.deb packages has been ported, for example enough to run a
buildd. Don't
hesitate to ask for more details.
I would like to thank Skyrock/Telefun for hosting the
machine, Debian
for buying it, and our former DPL, Sam Hocevar, who made
this possible.
-- Aurélien Jarno
[2] http://www.debian-ports.o
rg
Debconf translation updates
---------------------------
Days have arrived where Debian developers and maintainers
are putting
their packages in shape for lenny. That is Good.
Among those are all these tiny changes for trivial issues
reported by
lintian that you ignored up to now (lintian got dozens of
new checks since
Etch, did you know?). That is Good.
Among those are the various warnings about writing style in
debconf
templates (use of first person, interrogative form for
select/multiselect, no sentences in notes
"titles"). Maintainers are
tempted to fix those. That is Good.
Then, they upload fixed packages. That is Bad... 
Please consider, when modifying debconf templates, to use
the
shiny tool named "podebconf-report-po", from the
po-debconf package. It
allows maintainers to send out "call for
translations" to translators
who have incomplete work *and even* send out calls for new
translations.
One recommended use for that is:
cd debian/
debconf-updatepo
podebconf-report-po --call --languageteam
--with-translators --deadline=`date -d '+10days'`
(see 'man podebconf-report-po' for more and more options...
The above
will send both a call for updates to existing translators,
CC'ed to
translation teams AND a call for new translations to
debian-i18n, with
a 10 days translation update "window", which is
the minimum we need)
-- Christian Perrier
Planet Debian via Mail(ing list)
--------------------------------
Joey Schulze announced the existence of a mailing list
that
distributes articles aggregated at Planet Debian[3].
This enables interested people to read web log articles
without having
the need to use a feed reader or to setup a personal rss to
mail
conversion utility. Here is the full text of his
announcement[4]:
/--
Every once in a while some people complain about the
implied need to
read articles on Planet Debian who don't have the desire to
graze the
website on their own. There are RSS feeds but this requires
the use of
RSS feed readers.
Most of these people are subscribed to several mailing
lists in order to
keep up with the development within the Debian project. For
those people
I have created a mailing list several years ago that
distributes
articles from Planet Debian via mail. This way, Planet
Debian is just
similar to a mailing list without threads and more people
can keep up
with it.
Those who are interested execute the following command:
echo subscribe ticker-planetdebian | mail majordomo lists.infodrom.org
--
-- Stefano Zacchiroli
[3] http://planet.debian.org/
[4] http:
//www.infodrom.org/~joey/log/?200804201121
--
Raphaël Hertzog
Le best-seller français mis à jour pour Debian Etch :
http://www.o
uaza.com/livre/admin-debian/
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