Debian Weekly News - 2007 Timeline
This special supplement to Debian Weekly News is a review of the most important happenings of 2007 in the Debian community. This is certainly not a comprehensive list. The focus is on unusual and notable events, not the continual background development activity and discussions.
Here are the most memorable events of 2007 in the Debian community:
January
- Debian GNU/Linux 3.0
Woody
is removed from the official mirrors and archived on archive.debian.org. - Debian MiniConf6 took place at LCA 2007 in Sydney, Australia on January 15th and 16th.
- The idea of a Social Committee is discussed on the debian-project mailing list.
February
- Debian GNU/Linux 3.1
Sarge
received its fifth update. - Jörg Jaspert announced a new policy for handling inactive developer accounts.
- The location of the eight Debian annual conference, DebConf, has been announced: Mar del Plata, Argentina.
- FOSDEM 2007 took place in Brussels, Belgium on the 24th and 25th. About 50 Debian contributors discussed development in the Debian DevRoom.
March
- The Debian internationalization team announces that it has reached a historical 100% translation rate of package installation prompts for the French language. Many other languages are close to completion.
- The Alioth team adds support for the Mercurial version control system, joining CVS, Arch, Bazaar and Git.
- Release of the RC2 version of the
Etch
Debian installer, with support for resizing of Windows Vista NFTS partitions, improvements to the graphical installer, new CD/DVD image types tuned for KDE or Xfce desktop environments and new multi-arch installation media. - Ian Murdoch, Debian founder, joined Sun Microsystems to work on OpenSolaris.
- Linden Labs, creators of the popular Second Life online game, announced that their architecture runs on thousands of Debian servers.
April
- Sam Hocever is elected Project Leader.
- Debian GNU/Linux 3.1
Sarge
received its sixth update and is moved to the oldstable part of the archive. - Debian
GNU/Linux 4.0
Etch
is released after 21 months of developement, with support for eleven architectures, a new graphical installer, secure APT, KDE 3.5, GNOME 2.14, X.Org 7.1, etc - The Debian Project announced that it will participate in Google's 2007 Summer of Code.
May
- The Debian Popularity Contest reached 50,000 contributors.
- The future of the 32-bit version of the SPARC port, sparc32, is discussed on the debian-sparc list.
June
- The eight Debian annual conference, DebConf7, took place in Edinburgh, Scotland from June 17th to June 23rd, preceded by Debian Day on the 16th, and the annual DebCamp from the 10th to the 15th.
July
- The FTP and lists teams sent calls for contributors.
- Debian
Edu / Skolelinux 3.0
Terra
is released.
August
- The Project endorsed the concept of Debian Maintainers.
- Debian GNU/Linux 4.0
Etch
got its first update.
September
- packages.debian.org got a major overhaul.
- A new dpkg version with support for fine grained symbol based dependecies is uploaded to experimental.
October
- Steve McIntyre posted a Google Summer of Code 2007 wrap-up.
- The Alioth team announced support for Darcs, the testing-security team posted an update, the security team announced the Debian Security Tracker.
- The Project decides to reduced the length of the DPL election process.
- Dates for DebConf8 announced: August 2nd to August 17th 2008.
November
- The DSA team gets a new member for the first time in several years.
- MiniDebConf Venezuela 2007 is announced.
December
- The location of the tenth Debian annual conference, DebConf9, is announced: Extremadura, Spain.
- The DebConf7 final report is released.
- Debian
Edu / Skolelinux 3.0
Terra
received its first update, r1. - The One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project reported
that it uses Debian 4.0
Etch
to power its backend servers. - Debian GNU/Linux 4.0
Etch
got its second update. - Debian GNU/Linux 3.1
Sarge
received its seventh update.
As Debian Weekly News enters its ten year, we would like to thank everybody who contributed to DWN in the past. Special thanks also go to the hoard of translators who make DWN available in a dozen languages. And finally, thanks to everyone in the Debian community for providing such a plethora of interesting discussions, events, and hard work for us to report on.
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Debian Weekly News is edited by Martin 'Joey' Schulze.