Next Debian release by year-end... maybe

By Sam Varghese
Monday, 28 January 2008 06:00

Opinion and Analysis

The next release of Debian GNU/Linux, Lenny, is expected to take place before the end of 2008, senior developer Martin Krafft told a miniconference on the distribution at the Australian national Linux conference today.
However, with a twinkle in his eye, Krafft indicated that the traditional delays which have generally been a part of Debian could eventuate - "last time we were only four months late so this time if it goes into February 2009, it would be an improvement," he said.

Outlining the existing state of the project and looking forward to expected developments this year, Krafft said Lenny would have a separate port called the GNU/kFreeBSD. Support for the sparc32 architecture would be discontinued and there would be a new archive to support unofficial ports.

The security team was beginning to close the gap between testing and production use and three new people had joined the security team, Krafft said. There would be better co-operation between the two teams so that stable v testing would become embargoed v non-embargoed; essentially this means that security fixes can make their way into the testing distribution much faster.

Debian always has three streams of development - stable, testing and unstable.

Krafft said there would be better security hardening in Lenny with compiler/linker extensions to guard against the most common run-time problems such as buffer overflows.

Debian also plans to improve its package descriptions making them more easily translatable into the 58 languages that the project now supports.

Krafft said the project had created a new status for those who were involved in the project, that of Debian maintainer. Once someone had been maintaining a package for some time, they would be allowed to upload directly without going through their sponsors as has been the case.

However, the maintainers would not have voting rights, would not be able to access the debian-private mailing list, and additionally would not have access to the Debian infrastructure.

There would also be a move to identify inactive developers, those who still had all the privileges of an active developer, including write access. Krafft said this was a potential security problem.