Three binary packages of note, which I was involved in, have recently entered Intrepid for the first time in Ubuntu.

The Batik SVG library and FOP, the XSL-FO processor, have been in the Ubuntu archive since Warty, but always failed to build. Thanks to the efforts of Onkar Shinde (slytherin) and me, the build issues have been resolved and the binary packages have entered Intrepid.

As a whole on the Java front, I sure hope that its activity will increase with the addition of OpenJDK to Ubuntu and Debian. Note to prospective maintainers: if you’re out of things to package, package Java libraries! This is an area where both distributions are severely lacking. You could start with the dependencies of Execute Query, a database administration tool written in Swing. (Batik was one of them – thankfully, we have that covered now!)

The Code::Blocks IDE, version 8.02, was packaged by Michael Casadevall (NCommander). I already had a package lying on REVU before that, but I figured that someone actually interested in the software would make a better maintainer than someone who packaged it “just because it wasn’t there before”.