Jessie was frozen on November 5th, as planned. At the time of the freeze, 310 RC bugs remained to be fixed.
This is quite an achievement from the project as a whole, and the Release Team specifically. First, we froze on the date announced more than a year ago, and the freeze seems to have been well respected by all maintainers.
Second, with 310 RC bugs at the time of the freeze, we are probably breaking a record for all recent Debian releases (though I don’t have hard numbers for that). It seems that auto-removals of RC-buggy non-key packages helped a lot to keep the bug number under control. Assuming that all RC-buggy non-key packages were removed (which would be quite sad of course), we would even be down to about 150 RC bugs!
Could we have the shorter Debian freeze ever? (wheezy: 44 weeks; squeeze: 26 weeks; lenny: 28 weeks; etch: 17 weeks). Given that FOSDEM is 12 weeks away, could we even release before FOSDEM, and have a big party there to celebrate?
That’s not impossible, but we need everybody’s help. Random tip and tricks:
- Richard Hartmann’s weekly stats are actually generated from this web page, that provides a good live breakdown of RC bugs per category. Some RC bugs are hard, but some just deserve more attention. Some ideas of rather easy tasks:
- In the RC bugs list, sort bugs by last modification, take a bug that wasn’t worked on recently, and try to provide a summary of the situation and of possible actions.
- In the RC bugs list, sort bugs by bug number, and look at recent bugs: you might be among the first ones to look at them, so there might still be easy ways to make progress.
- Review and analyze proposed solutions in the lists of bugs with patches, or which have been fixed in unstable but not unblocked yet.
- And of course, try to attack the bulk of bugs without known fixes, and advance towards such a fix!
- If you are not so good at fixing bugs, do like me, and become good at opening new (real) bugs: the sooner they will be found, the sooner they can be fixed! I just opened ~100 RC bugs this morning, caused by packages failing to build from source in jessie.