The release team first started holding a regular, public planning and status meeting a little over a year ago, in September 2015. At that time, FTP masters had experimented along similar lines and I took some inspiration from that, including the keeping of proper minutes that anyone can look at. I wanted to open up…

Release day is a nerve-wracking time for several teams. Happily we’ve done it a few times now*, so we have a rough idea of how the process should go. There have been some preparations going on in advance: Last week we imposed a “quiet period” on migrations. That’s about as frozen as we can get;…

One further contributor became a non-uploading Debian Developer in 2015, joining 11 others who achieved that status its introduction in 2010. Non-uploading developers are really important to our project. They’re a recognition of the invaluable work that contributors do which doesn’t involve packaging, for which they may not have the skill nor inclination. Nevertheless we…

Two years, give or take a few weeks, is roughly the time required to prepare a new stable release since Sarge in 2005 (source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debian#Release_timeline). A Spring release has also been a pretty stable pattern during that time. Debian often has a reputation for being very slow to release (in terms of cadence), or for freezes…

Three is the new number for continuing oldstable security support: thanks to the efforts of those behind the Long-Term Support initiative, the full stable lifecycle of a release has therefore become five years (source: https://www.debian.org/News/2014/20140424). Where do those numbers come from? 2 years as stable, 1 year overlap support as oldstable, plus 2 new years under…

Four architectures – types of computing device that you can use to run Debian – didn’t make it through architecture qualification for Jessie and won’t be part of the official stable release this weekend. It’s always difficult to see architectures go, particularly when there is still a community interested in maintaining support for them. Nevertheless,…

Five contributors became uploading Debian Developers so far in 2015 (source: https://nm.debian.org/public/people).

I like how contributors.debian.org reminds me of things I used to have time for, and motivates me to find some for them.

With over a hundred RC bugs still outstanding for Jessie, there’s never been a better time to host a bug-squashing party in your local area. Here’s how I do it. At home is fine, if you don’t mind guests. You don’t need to seek out a sponsor and borrow or hire office space. If there…

We have had a rather more successful weekend then I feared, as you can see from our log on the wiki page. Steve reproduced and wrote patches for several installer/bootloader bugs, and Neil and I spent significant time in a maze of twisty zope packages (we have managed to provide more diagnostics on the bug,…