As you probably already know, Debian released Squeeze aka Debian 6.0 this week-end. It was a really great week-end.

I saw quite a few release already, but none with so much online social activity. Alexander and Meike Schmehl live commented the release on the Debian identi.ca account and Joey Hess held his Debian Party Line.

On top of this, the team in charge of the website rolled out a new design on quite a few online services during the week-end including www.debian.org, wiki.debian.org, planet.debian.org and more.

Congratulations to all the people who made this happen (and the release team in particular). It’s great to see Debian achieve all of this.

Do you know that it’s the third time in a row that we manage to release in the 18-24 months timeframe? 3.1: June 2005 → 4.0: April 2007 → 5.0: February 2009 → 6.0: February 2011.

Yes, despite our size and the fact that we are all volunteers, we have managed to stick to a reasonable schedule for a stable distribution that is deployed on a large scale.

Wheezy kicks off

The best part of the release for us — the developers — is that wheezy is now open for development and we can work on new features for the next release. 😉

And it started quickly: according to UDD, wheezy already features 488 new source packages that are not in squeeze, 1713 updated source packages and among those 1246 are new upstream versions.

I really look forward to the upcoming projects and related discussions.

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For the curious, here are the UDD queries I used:

# Updated packages in wheezy
select count(source) from sources_uniq as su where (select version from sources_uniq where release='squeeze' and distribution='debian' and source = su.source) < su.version and release='wheezy' and distribution='debian';
# Updated with a new upstream version
select count(source) from sources_uniq as su where debversion(regexp_replace((select version from sources_uniq where release='squeeze' and distribution='debian' and source = su.source), '-.*', '')) < debversion(regexp_replace(su.version, '-.*', '')) and release='wheezy' and distribution='debian';
# New package in wheezy
select count(source) from sources_uniq as su where source not in (select source from sources_uniq where release='squeeze' and distribution='debian' and source = su.source) and release='wheezy' and distribution='debian';