Hi,
This note is primarily meant to alleviate the concerns about woody being
released. Please read on if you care about the release.
To reiterate the main point from the April 30th mail by Anthony Towns, the
release of woody is being held back because there is no systematic way to
build packages in security advisories on all architectures included in
woody.
To elaborate on this, the current situation is that when a security advisory
is to be done for a package that is in woody, the security team people would
need to go running around searching for eleven machines where they can build
the new package. For some architectures, it's not hard to do this, but for
some other, it's much harder to find a suitable machine. Bear in mind that
these are, in fact, _security_-sensitive packages, so you can't just build
them on J. Random Hacker's machine and distribute them worldwide.
So, the ftpmaster team started doing changes to the buildd system and the
archive maintenance scripts. These changes did get done in the first week of
May as expected, but we haven't released woody yet because the overall
testing and implementation on all buildds is still not complete. Rest
assured that this will get done, as the guys really are working on it.
Several buildds are already testing the new scheme. It's merely not certain
when this will be finished.
We can only ask you to be patient. :-)
If anyone wishes to see the code changes in detail, CVS trees are available
at:
:pserver:anonymous@cvs.debian.org:/cvs/dak module dak
:pserver:anon@cvs.linux-m68k.org:/CVS module wanna-build
The first tree is also available via http://cvs.debian.org/dak/?cvsroot=dak
You can observe the times between your uploads and when the buildds get to
them via http://buildd.debian.org/
In the meantime, woody has been frozen. We have accumulated some more RC
bugs, and the software has become that much older. Work continues on the
unstable distribution, which is clear for uploading as always. It will be
possible to propagate the newly fixed packages into woody, too, there is no
need to worry about that. Whether woody will be unfrozen and test-cycled
again, or include the patched packages in a point release, we are not sure,
but the release-critical problems that aren't fixed will eventually be
fixed.
Thank you for your patience.
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