November 10, 2006

Debian 4.0 (etch): getting closer and closer...

ATTENTION: This post is also a reference for myself. So there's a change I won't post it fully written, and also a change that it will be updated over the time.

Debian 4.0 (codename 'etch') is going to be the next Debian release, and the release date is getting closer and closer... So I've decided to write something about it's development and what will happen in the next days. The final release is scheduled for December, but there's no release before a release candidate, right? The first release candidate is here to download, and another is expected before the final release. More important than that is the list of "Release Critical bugs": the bugs that need to be fixed so etch can be released. At this exact moment I count 25 RC bugs. If you want to help Debian, picking up on one of these and help solving it would be really nice. Let me give you a little preview of them:

updating ca-certificates can go seriously wrong since links to everything but *.pem files are deleted. IMHO this should be fixed with an enforcement of this by using openssl to convert the certificates. Fumitoshi should be the one making a decision on how to fix this, but since he doesn't show any activity on the bug since the 27th of October, I think that somebody else among the Debian developers should take a position on this...

cdrkit has an ugly licensing problem. If you need the license, it extends and restricts GPL, itself in a violation of the GPL. Talking with the guy that made all the licensing mess would be useless, so IMHO the really nice move would be to replace cdrkit with an alternative like dvdrtools...

The whole Mozilla copyright issues are still here to be solved for etch. Firefox still needs to be renamed to iceweasel, just like thunderbird was to icedove. I'm not really sure how can anyone help speeding up the process, but contacting the maintainer should be a wise move.

This one is quite simple. There are some patches for gcc-4.1 that must be backported to gcc-4.0. If you're up to do some easy work to help Debian, this is a recommendation.

Weeeeird. If you know well HAL internals, please read this.

This one seems to be being worked on by Aurélien, but if you have some free time in your hands contact him and get assured that he doesn't need help...

For this arm and mispel hosts are needed. Can you help?

For this one we just need to wait. I should check about it in a couple of days for updates, tho.

This one was tagged moreinfo, but today more info came. Should check this later, after the maintainer has time to read the info.



More updates on this soon.

2 comments:

  1. Anonymous3:36 PM

    In Ubuntu (I know it is not the same thing) I noticed a bug in the 5.* release that did not get fixed in the 6.10 release. The issue is this:
    Add a nfs mount to the /etc/fstab but make shure it has no noauto so that the system tries to mount it on startup.
    The issue is that it will try to mount it before portmap is started so it will loke the machine untill it times out. One workaround is to add the nolock option to the fstab options. But then you loose file locking...

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  2. Well, I'm sorry but I'm not really into Ubuntu... Yet, did you consider reporting the issue to the Ubuntu team?

    https://launchpad.net/distros/ubuntu/+bugs/

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