Debian Freeze Rescheduled

A number of people have written in to say that the Debian Potato freeze has been rescheduled for a month or two, as the boot floppy code needs some serious work. Click below to read the letter.

from debian-devel-announce@debian.org:

I was too hasty when declaring this freeze. Adam di Carlo assured me that the boot-floppies are just not ready yet, and won't be for a number of weeks even if they get help. Also, the count of release-critical bugs is going back up as fast as it came down. (I think that many of them are not really release-critical, but there are so many that just evaluating them takes a significant amount of time.)

I hoped that a week or two of old-style freeze could get potato in shape in time for a mid-December release, but it's just not going to happen. Adam says that the boot-floppies can be ready for freezing on December 1st, and of release-quality on January 1st, and that those dates are somewhat optimistic.

I think that freezing on either of those dates is not useful, due to the winter festivities and the end of the world. I'm rescheduling the freeze for mid-January, the weekend of the 15th and 16th. This will be a freeze according to the original plan for potato, with all the pieces ready beforehand and a fast track to a release in February.

Please keep this freeze date in mind; don't start anything that you can't finish before that time. In particular, with library upgrades and package reorganizations, keep in mind that other packages will have to be recompiled. I'll ask the archive maintainers to actually hold back such packages starting around December 20th.

The good news is that James and I spent a day processing most of Incoming in preparation for the freeze (and I apologize to James for not actually freezing after all that), so the backlog is now gone.

In the meantime, the boot-floppies NEED HELP. If you want to get involved, you can check out their code with this command: cvs -d youraccount@cvs.debian.org:/cvs/debian-boot co boot-floppies Make sure that CVS_RSH is set to ssh.

The mailing list for coordination is debian-boot; CVS update messages are also sent there. The bug reports are collected under the package name "boot-floppies".

Richard Braakman

Comments

Quit complaining and contribute!

[Some guy named Chris]

Sheesh, so many people here saying "2.4 will be out before Potato", "Slink was out of date when it came out, and so will be Potato", etc.

My favorite was the one saying Debian needs to speed up their bug resolution process. Don't you folks get it? If you want it to improve, you've got to help. Don't sit there complaining expecting some mysterious software overlord to fix all the little problems and hand you a nice new Debian distribution for Christmas. Get your hands dirty, fix some of the problems in the boot floppies, or shut up and don't complain when they don't get fixed as soon as you would like.

Debian isn't some monolithic software corporation, it's people like you, like me, like everyone else who thinks that Linux is fun, that's it's a priviledge and a responsibility to give back. I know not everyone is a programmer, but each and every one of you can do something. Spend an hour writing a HOW-TO, or updating a man page, or trying to reproduce a bug, something, anything other than complaining on slashdot that Debian is delayed.

Please, re-read the letter. They are asking for your help. So, if you really want Debian to succeed, quit being a consumer in the gift economy, and start being a producer. It doesn't have to be much, but anything is better than whining.

Sorry, rant mode off.

Some guy named Chris

Re:It's a shame.

[luge]

As long as developers are interested (which they clearly are- Debian has a horrible backlog of developer registrations) there will be continued Debian releases. No need to fret on that count. And while these releases are slow, stable is perfectly usable for the vast majority of serious work- and for those who have stability as only priority one and not priority 1, 2, and 3, there is always potato, which has died on me only once in several months of usage on two machines. Remember, apt-get dist-upgrade is your friend, and can give you a 2.2.x system within the hour if you are on a fast connection, and overnight otherwise.
~luge
(BTW, methinks the release date for 2.4 is pretty optimistic too :)