Hi, we wish those of you who celebrate it a Merry Christmas, and those of you who change year soon a Happy New Year. Release status of etch is not as far as we all wanted at this time of the year, but - it is moving forward! There are a few items to resolve so that we could actually release. We need your help there - in whichever area you want to help us, please do so. Please remember: Releasing of Debian is a common effort of the whole community. There are also good news. One of them is that the security team told us that we now have security support for Etch (and also that Etch has been in a good status for some time now regarding security). linux-2.6 ~~~~~~~~~ There are a few disturbing bug reports currently open. A very bad one is file system corruption since the msync-patch was applied (which was considered a pre-condition for LSB 3.1-qualification however) - we share this issue with upstream linux kernel 2.6.19, and is not sorted out there either (or rather, Martin Michlmayr is sorting it out both inside the Debian kernel and upstream). Also, there are quite many bug reports against linux-2.6 which need review. Release Critical Bugs ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Since the last release update, many release critical bug reports were fixed, however also many filed - the number of release critical bugs didn't really go down. More work needs to happen on resolving the number of release critical bugs. If the current trend continues, we can release soon - but if more people would fix bad bugs, we could release earlier. A lot of release critical bug reports have been mass-filed during the recent days on rather trivial issues - we decided to set the number of minimum waiting days in our NMU policy to 5 days now, but of course you can still wait longer if you consider this appropriate. We also decided to not consider new detected violations against "Packages must not install programs in the default PATH with different functionality with the same file name" release critical for etch anymore - of course, any such issue will be release critical for lenny (and please continue fixing such issues). Documentation: Release Notes, Installation Manual ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ The documentation needs to be finalised for Etch. This are mainly the Release Notes and the Installation Manual. We need also to figure out the best order for updates of an installed system, and how regular users can prevent important parts of their system to be removed when using aptitude on the command line. Debian-Installer Release Candidate 2 ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ The last but not least requirement is the publication of the Debian- Installer Release Candidate 2. libpng ~~~~~~ A package that gave us shivers is libpng. Since the upload of a new upstream version, we noticed some regressions. On deeper analysis, we also detected missing symbols since Sarge - however, they even disappeared earlier. We finally arrived at a solution - that costed many hours of our time, but the new version has already moved to testing since then, so no more worries here. Please allow us to remind you once again on the upload policy: If your upload is not meant for Etch, do not upload it to unstable but to experimental. If your upload is meant for Etch, please make sure prior to your upload that it matches our criteria as mentioned in the last mail, and also make sure your upload actually reaches Etch. Cheers, -- Andi Debian Release Team http://release.debian.org/
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