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Debian Lenny Edges Closer to the Goal

Every software project, especially one with a history as long and colorful as Debian's, is bound to occasionally run into a release that it'd rather just put behind it and move onwards. The release itself, when finalized, might be the best ever -- but getting to the finalized point will induce flashbacks for years.

Debian's Lenny hopefully isn't that emotionally scarring, but it's undoubtedly been a release fraught with more than the usual amount of headaches. In October, Lisa reported that Lenny faced a delay due to some critical bugs. As the voting period on whether the inclusion of non-free binary blobs in Lenny meshed with the Debian Free Software Guidelines was held, Manoj Srivastava announced his resignation from the secretary post.

Last week, the votes were tabulated, and Lenny is set to move forward.

The end result is that Lenny will be released with the assumption that all blobs comply with the GPL unless proven otherwise. This means that the kernel packages that are currently in the Lenny archive have been given the all clear to appear in the final release.

Though there's not yet been a date set for Lenny's launch, the Debian team announced that a few final issues were being addressed (the finalized installer) and they anticipate a second release candidate (accompanied by a deep freeze on included packages) will be announced shortly.

• open source
• linux
• testing
• debian
• kernel
• lenny
• DFSG
• vote

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