Camptocamp sponsored one of the Debian distribution’s Bug Squashing Parties (BSP), which was held in Bern last week-end (27-28 nov. 2010).
Debian’s “testing” branch is currently frozen, which means no new features get added to the distribution, only bugfixes are allowed in. At this point, people focus on bugfixing and several BSPs are usually organised. It’s also the time when any Debian developer is allowed to fix bugs on packages maintained by others, through the “Non-Maintainer Upload” (NMU) mechanism.
During the BSP in Bern, a bit more than 30 bugs were worked on by a handful of Debian developers, maintainers and users. Most of these bugs which were tackled are considered “Release Critical” (RC); which are either security issues, grave disfunctions in software (crashes, data corruption), uninstallable/unremovable/unupgradable packages, or licencing problems.
The next step after the freeze is of course the release of the Debian GNU/Linux distribution’s next “stable” version, which will be 6.0, codename “squeeze”.
At Camptocamp, for its stablility, robustness and versatility, Debian is our system of choice on the hundreds of servers installed and maintained by the Infrastructure division. We are therefore looking forward to the next release, which will bring us another step forward in the industrialisation and automation process.