Debian 3.0 (woody) Freeze Begins

From: Anthony Towns (ajt@debian.org)
Date: Sun Jul 01 2001 - 03:04:48 CEST

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    Hello world, and welcome to a new week, a new month, and a new phase of
    woody's development cycle.

    Welcome to the woody freeze.

    As previously proposed, the freeze will proceed in four phases: first
    policy will be frozen, followed by the base system, followed by standard
    installs, and concluding with the remainder of Debian. The aim of this
    first part of the freeze is to finalise our expectations of the release
    (what we want packages to look like, what architectures we're going to
    release) and to prepare ourselves for the freezing the base system by
    ensuring that the base system is releasable.

    Note that this does *not* involve a freeze on package development yet:
    bugfixes, and new features are still welcome, and will continue being
    added to woody in the usual way. What it does mean is that your packages
    will be frozen in the near future, so now is probably a good time to
    limit yourself to only introducing new features that have already been
    heavily tested upstream, and fixing bugs.

    In detail, the goals for this phase are:

        * Finalise debian-policy: accept any further proposals that woody
          packages should concern themselves with; and ensure -policy is a
          useful document for people working on quality assurance.

          Deadline: final version of debian-policy for woody needs to be
          uploaded to the archive by July 21st.

        * Finalise our target architectures. As well as alpha, arm, i386,
          m68k, powerpc and sparc, we have the opportunity to include ia64
          (Intel's new 64bit Itanium architecture), hppa (HP's PA-RISC
          architecture), mips and mipsel (SGI and Decstation machines), too.
          Requirements for inclusion in woody are fairly simple and have been
          met, or are close to being met, by all those architectures. For
          reference, they are: a working, relatively stable toolchain,
          a usable system (including all of base and standard; and a fair
          chunk of optional and extra), and a functional install. (Hurd people,
          see below)

          Deadline: someone from each architecture that wants to release
          needs to mail -release with their current status, and a successful
          install report by July 24th.

        * Determine whether cryptographic software can be moved from
          non-US/main to main. Ben Collins (project leader) is hustling this
          through the appropriate avenues.

          Deadline: legal advice needs to be obtained by July 21st.

        * Ensure the base system is releasable on all architectures:
          this means making sure we know what packages, exactly, the base
          system consists of on all architectures; and fixing any and all
          release critical bugs (ie, with severities critical, grave or
          serious) in those packages.

          Deadline: base packages need to be free of RC bugs by July 21st.

    If all goes well, the next phase will begin on the 1st of August. If
    all goes incredibly well, we'll release in November. Ha ha ha.

    The main risk that may affect moving on to the next phase is the
    possiblity of finding release critical bugs in the base system that
    take significant amounts of time to fix.

    As you've noticed by a careful analysis of the subject line, the woody
    release will be numbered Debian 3.0, in recognition of the large number
    of changes made since potato. This is, to put it mildly, a somewhat
    controversial decision, but it's one I get to make. Personally, I'm
    pretty happy with the way woody's progressing, and I think by the time
    it's released it'll easily live up to that number -- and by that I mean
    the "3", not the ".0".

    On the subject of controversial decisions, one I'm not going to make today
    is what to call the release after woody. That one will be made when woody
    is released and a new testing distribution is forked from woody. Besides
    which, I still haven't gotten around to rewatching Toy Story.

    While I may not be too concerned one way or another about the name of the
    next release, I do have some ideas about how it might be good to handle
    the next release. My overriding goal for this release was to manage to
    get a short, controllable freeze; one that we can get over and done with
    in a few months, rather than letting it drag on for seven months with no
    end in sight, but this came at a cost of letting the development cycle
    go on for quite a while: ten and a half months, as it turned out. For
    the next cycle (assuming this freeze actually turns out to be relatively
    short and controlled), I think it would be interesting to see if we can
    do the same thing again, with a short (2 or 3 month) development cycle,
    for a 5 to 7 month release cycle.

    Which would mean you mightn't need to worry too much about not getting
    the neat new feature you were planning on working on into woody, if
    that's any consolation.

    And on that note, I'm inclined to think Hurd is probably better off
    targetting the next freeze, (in, say, six to eight months from today)
    rather than woody. In particular, Hurd is at present both a difficult
    target to port to (and thus has a quite limited range of software when
    compared to the Linux ports of Debian) and isn't able to self install.

    In short, the freeze, she is begun. Have at it.

    Cheers,
    aj

    -- 
    Anthony Towns <ajt@debian.org>
    Debian Release Manager
    


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