THIS IS A DRAFT
THIS IS A DRAFT
THIS IS A DRAFT

From: Colin Watson <cjwatson@debian.org>
To: debian-devel-announce@lists.debian.org
Subject: Provisional release update

It's been a little longer than it should have been since the last one.
Sorry. This is a not-terribly-formal update to get some news out despite
the members of the release team being somewhat snowed under with other
things at the moment.

So, once again, where are we?

debian-installer beta3 was released on 15 March as planned, and seems to
be holding up fairly well. It was still short of some architectures,
though: namely arm, hppa, mipsel, powerpc, and s390. Development on all
of these is continuing, and we should have a beta3 update soon to add a
couple of those missing architectures and fix up some other errata. The
plan from now on is to release d-i betas at roughly monthly intervals,
with beta5 being the one we aim to release as stable after a further
month or so of testing.

If you have some spare time and want to help Debian release, working on
d-i should be your number one priority. Without an installer, we don't
release; architectures without a working d-i won't be candidates for
releasing. Personally, I found it surprisingly easy to get started with
the daily netinst images and a batch of CD-Rs until I figured out how to
build my own netboot images. Go for it.

As far as the rest of the distribution goes, we want to freeze for as
short a time as possible. Long freezes are a serious impediment (those
who remember the potato freeze will know what I mean), and cause no
little confusion, so we'll only freeze completely once the d-i schedule
for a stable release is clear. However, we do need to stop base system
churn causing problems for d-i. To that end:

  * As of now, no new packages will be added to the base system. This
    means that packages in the base system *must not* change their
    dependencies.

  * Large changes to the base system must be cleared with the release
    team and the d-i team before being uploaded to unstable.

  * Changes to the base system should avoid regressing translations.

Elsewhere, please keep on fixing RC bugs, particularly in packages that
are important enough that removal isn't an option. Less important
packages with unfixed RC bugs are likely to be removed.