Hello world, Huntin' Season never stops. Now that the Social Contract issues are apparently resolved, and the new installer is nearly ready, we need to do some hard work to raise the quality of sarge and finish off the release. In aid of this, we're going to hold a bug-squashing party this weekend. Sorry for the short notice; if you miss this one, I believe some people will be organizing an effort next weekend too, and we'll keep going until sarge is ready. At the time of writing, http://bugs.debian.org/release-critical/ says that there are 297 release-critical bugs affecting sarge. Many of these are easy: 93 of those have the patch tag set on them. If we make a concentrated effort now, we can get the number down to a figure where the number of packages that the release team has to remove from sarge is not too painful. We need to concentrate first and foremost on problems in the base system and in the set of packages installed as standard, namely those listed here, since there's no option of removing those: http://bugs.qa.debian.org/cgi-bin/base.cgi http://bugs.qa.debian.org/cgi-bin/standard.cgi However, help with anything on the RC bug list is welcome. Even if you aren't a Debian developer, you can help by diagnosing bugs, narrowing down their causes, and/or providing patches. There'll be a number of developers around to upload changes. For developers making non-maintainer uploads, please remember to keep your changes minimal, and to ensure that the changes are filed in the bug tracking system. You can use Tollef Fog Heen's delayed incoming queue at gluck:~tfheen/DELAYED/ to automate the task of mailing a patch, giving the maintainer a chance to respond, and uploading a fixed package. I suggest a delay of a few days should be sufficient for long-standing bugs. Remember to watch the package to make sure you haven't introduced any new problems, and do your best to produce changes that are correct and in line with how the maintainer maintains the package. We'll be coordinating in the #debian-bugs IRC channel on Freenode, irc.freenode.net (some people will be around on OFTC too). There are various links in the topic of that channel which may be helpful. If you need further incentive, the effectiveness of bug-squashing parties is likely to be a major input into release planning. If they do well, we have more room to be aggressive. For reference, it looks like the d-i team will be ready to put out a release candidate in a few weeks' time, and, if that and the bug count both look good, then we should be looking to freeze shortly afterwards and release once the security team has got up to speed and a final round of d-i tweaking is done. However, we can only do this with your help. Cheers, -- Colin Watson [cjwatson@debian.org]
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