Debian's next release likely this weekend

Sam Varghese
Monday, 31 January 2011 08:21

Opinion and Analysis

The next release of the Debian GNU/Linux distribution is likely to take place this weekend. The last release, Lenny, was made on February 14, 2009.

However, given that Debian only makes a release when it is ready, and not according to some artificial timetable, the date could slip.

If some release-critical bugs are found at the last minute, then the release will be delayed until those are fixed.

But there is optimism in the Debian ranks that February 5 will be the release date, to the extent that 42 release parties have already been planned at the time of writing.

Debian supports the most ports of any GNU/Linux distribution and in addition will be making two non-Linux releases this time

These are the Debian GNU/kFreeBSD ports, for the i386 and amd64 processors. This port consists of GNU userland using the GNU C library, the FreeBSD kernel, and the regular Debian package set.

Debian has three streams of development at all times - stable, testing and unstable. Only security updates are released for the stable stream which is the production release.

Packages are first uploaded to the unstable stream, this is cutting-edge stuff and only very experienced people use it.

The packages then move to the testing stream which ultimately becomes the next stable release.

The Debian project was started in 1993 and produces a community distribution that is the base for more than 100 other distributions, including the most widely used distribution, Ubuntu.