FREEZE RESCHEDULED
I was too hasty when declaring this freeze. Adam di Carlo assured me that
the boot-floppies are just not ready yet, and won't be for a number of
weeks even if they get help. Also, the count of release-critical bugs
is going back up as fast as it came down. (I think that many of them
are not really release-critical, but there are so many that just
evaluating them takes a significant amount of time.)
I hoped that a week or two of old-style freeze could get potato in
shape in time for a mid-December release, but it's just not going to
happen.
Adam says that the boot-floppies can be ready for freezing on December
1st, and of release-quality on January 1st, and that those dates are
somewhat optimistic.
I think that freezing on either of those dates is not useful, due to the
winter festivities and the end of the world. I'm rescheduling the
freeze for mid-January, the weekend of the 15th and 16th. This will
be a freeze according to the original plan for potato, with all the
pieces ready beforehand and a fast track to a release in February.
Please keep this freeze date in mind; don't start anything that you
can't finish before that time. In particular, with library upgrades
and package reorganizations, keep in mind that other packages will
have to be recompiled. I'll ask the archive maintainers to actually
hold back such packages starting around December 20th.
The good news is that James and I spent a day processing most of
Incoming in preparation for the freeze (and I apologize to James for
not actually freezing after all that), so the backlog is now gone.
In the meantime, the boot-floppies NEED HELP. If you want to get
involved, you can check out their code with this command:
cvs -d youraccount@cvs.debian.org:/cvs/debian-boot co boot-floppies
Make sure that CVS_RSH is set to ssh.
The mailing list for coordination is debian-boot; CVS update messages
are also sent there. The bug reports are collected under the
package name "boot-floppies".
Richard Braakman
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