Hi, This note is primarily meant to alleviate the concerns about woody being released. Please read on if you care about the release.
To reiterate the main point from the April 30th mail by Anthony Towns, the release of woody is being held back because there is no systematic way to build packages in security advisories on all architectures included in woody. To elaborate on this, the current situation is that when a security advisory is to be done for a package that is in woody, the security team people would need to go running around searching for eleven machines where they can build the new package. For some architectures, it's not hard to do this, but for some other, it's much harder to find a suitable machine. Bear in mind that these are, in fact, _security_-sensitive packages, so you can't just build them on J. Random Hacker's machine and distribute them worldwide. So, the ftpmaster team started doing changes to the buildd system and the archive maintenance scripts. These changes did get done in the first week of May as expected, but we haven't released woody yet because the overall testing and implementation on all buildds is still not complete. Rest assured that this will get done, as the guys really are working on it. Several buildds are already testing the new scheme. It's merely not certain when this will be finished. We can only ask you to be patient. :-) If anyone wishes to see the code changes in detail, CVS trees are available at: :pserver:[EMAIL PROTECTED]:/cvs/dak module dak :pserver:[EMAIL PROTECTED]:/CVS module wanna-build The first tree is also available via http://cvs.debian.org/dak/?cvsroot=dak You can observe the times between your uploads and when the buildds get to them via http://buildd.debian.org/ In the meantime, woody has been frozen. We have accumulated some more RC bugs, and the software has become that much older. Work continues on the unstable distribution, which is clear for uploading as always. It will be possible to propagate the newly fixed packages into woody, too, there is no need to worry about that. Whether woody will be unfrozen and test-cycled again, or include the patched packages in a point release, we are not sure, but the release-critical problems that aren't fixed will eventually be fixed. Thank you for your patience.
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