Jessie frozen, can we release before FOSDEM?

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.