Happy New Year, all! With the rounding of the calendar, we are now at the end of the stated "major, archive-shaking changes" period for etch. This was met with the near-perfect timing of kdelibs4c2a reaching testing on January 4, effectively bringing to a close the C++ ABI transition; the only things remaining are a few strangling libraries and some rebuilds of stand-alone C++ apps for the release team to worry about. So while there's still nine months or so of development time that maintainers can use for improving their packages, the overall shape of etch should be a lot like that of testing today. Going forward, please take care to coordinate with the release team if you will be uploading changes affecting more than a dozen or so source packages; and as always, if you are making changes to library packages that will affect dependent packages, please coordinate with those maintainers before uploading. We had one major archive-shaking change sneak under the wire, with the removal of xlibs-dev from unstable[1]. Those who follow the status of release-critical bugs in testing[2] will surely have noticed the impact of this event, with 576 new RC bugs appearing overnight (!). Maintainer responsiveness has been pretty good, with 159 bugs fixed by the maintainer and 33 fixed in NMU in the first week, but that still leaves two-thirds of these bugs yet to resolve; and of course, there are lots of other release-critical bugs that also need to be fixed before we can release. Which means... it's BSP time! A bug-squashing party will be held this weekend, 20-23Jan, in #debian-bugs on irc.oftc.net. The target of this BSP will be two-fold: to fix packages that still depend/build-depend on xlibs-dev, and to continue pruning the reverse-dependencies of libfreetype6 in preparation for an upcoming package rename. Pages are available in the Debian Wiki[3,4] for both transitions, and will be kept updated with relevant information for the BSP. Since we are currently in 0-day NMU mode and you've all received a recent refresher on NMU etiquette[5], and this BSP also has a fairly narrow focus, I'll forgo the usual incantations about BSP mechanics and instead refer you to past announcements in a comical trail of link indirection[6]. Of course, given that it *is* open season on bugs for etch, there's no need to wait for the weekend, or to limit yourself to just these particular bugs; people will be around on #debian-bugs most hours of the day to help with bug-related questions. So stop by for an hour, or waste your whole weekend; and enjoy the feel of bugs squishing beneath your bare toes. Fun for the whole family![7] -- Steve Langasek Give me a lever long enough and a Free OS Debian Developer to set it on, and I can move the world. vorlon@debian.org http://www.debian.org/ [1] http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2006/01/msg00003.html [2] http://bugs.debian.org/release-critical/ [3] http://wiki.debian.org/DependsXlibsDev [4] http://wiki.debian.org/FreetypeTransition [5] http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2006/01/msg00001.html [6] http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2005/08/msg00015.html [7] disclaimer: this message not endorsed by the family of Steve Langasek
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