Backports integrated in the main archive

March 20th, 2013

The Debian project is pleased to announce that the backports service for the next stable release Debian 7 (codename Wheezy) will be part of the main archive. Backports are packages mostly from the testing distribution (and in few cases from unstable too, e.g. security updates) recompiled in a stable environment so that they will run without new libraries (whenever it is possible) on the Debian stable distribution. While as for now this service was provided on a separated archive, starting with wheezy-backports the packages will be accessible from the regular pool.
The users of Wheezy will have to add to their sources.list file this entry:

deb http://ftp.debian.org/debian/ wheezy-backports main

All users of the service are invited to check their regular mirror if it carries backports and pull from there. Please note that this change does not affect the current stable release Debian 6 (codename Squeeze).

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The Debian Project is an association of Free Software developers who volunteer their time and effort in order to produce a completely free operating system known as Debian.

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