Buster Release: the Plan

Merely two hours after my last post, Niels Thykier sent an email to debian-devel-announce informing us that Buster’s Release is planned for July 6th (less than a month from now).

Personally that makes me happy; I didn’t want to wait until October (as per my former estimate). And I want to think that my post had nothing to do with it.

I mean, who am I kidding? Of course it didn’t. My reach is very limited and I’m pretty sure my voice doesn’t really count that much in Debian Grand Scheme of Things (this is not sarcasm, by the way). Seriously, I’m just not that important.

As explained before here in the blog, this is the final stretch of the Freeze; only the really important updates get in, and even so only if they are submitted before the deadline, which has been set to 2019-06-25 13:00 UTC. Anything that doesn’t make it may still get aboard one of the point releases later on in Buster’s Stable Life.

As for the RC Tracker bot, I’m gonna keep it running until the release. For now, I’ll update it to show the planned release date instead of an estimate. After that, I’m considering keeping it running to track Bullseye, but I’m not sure; this kind of tracking doesn’t really make much sense outside of a Freeze. Another possibility is to keep tracking Buster and follow point releases as they come along. That might be interesting because of packages that eventually don’t make it into the initial release (in case they don’t get their RC bugs fixed).

Here is the link for Niels’ full message. All love goes to the Release Team and their awesome work!