Next Debian release will not follow time-based freeze

Sam Varghese
Friday, 31 July 2009 07:21

Business IT - Technology

The Debian GNU/Linux Project has announced that it will not be following a time-based system for freezes for its next release, Squeeze.
The project had announced a time-based release system on Wednesday, with development freezes to take place in the December of odd years (2009, 201 and so on) and a release in the following Northern (corrected) spring.

However, yesterday spokesperson Meike Reichle said that the number of release goals for Squeeze meant that this schedule would not be kept for the release, a new timeline would be announced in early September.

According to a release from the project, Debian release manager Luk Claes has listed an ambitious set of goals for Squeeze:

Multiple-architecture support, which will, for instance, improve the installation of 32-bit packages on 64-bit machines;

kFreeBSD support, introducing the first non-Linux architecture into Debian;

Improved boot performance using dash as the new default shell, and a dependency-based boot system that will clean up the boot process and help performance through parallel processing;

A further enhanced Quality Assurance process resulting in higher quality packages. This includes clean installation, upgrade and removal of all packages, automatic rejection of packages failing basic quality checks;

Double compilation support;

Preparation for new package formats to help streamline future development and to introduce improved compression algorithms;

Removal of obsolete libraries for improved security;

Full ipv6 support;

Large File Support;

Automatic creation of debug packages for the entire archive, a Google Summer of Code Project pending integration into the infrastructure;

Moving of packages' long descriptions into a separate "translated package list", which will facilitate their translation and also provide a smaller footprint for embedded systems thanks to smaller Packages files;

Better integration of debtags, a system to tag packages with multiple attributes for easier package selection; and

Discarding and rebuild of binary packages uploaded by maintainers, leaving only packages build in a controlled environment.

Debian, which was set up in 1993, provides ports for more architectures than any other GNU/Linux distribution. The disbtribution is highly regarded, especially for its software management capabilities.