OStatic

The Debian team has tangled with more than its fair share of demons during the development cycle of the 5.0 Lenny release. Lenny, which was loosely scheduled for release in September 2008, was delayed due to the number of release-critical bugs that were awaiting patches. As the year came to a close, Lenny faced other challenges, including team management shake-ups and a vote on how to handle Lenny's inclusion of non-free binary blobs to best meet the Debian Free Software Guidelines.

On February 1st, Lenny's second release candidate was announced, as well as the release's deep freeze status. Lenny is scheduled for general release over the weekend of February 14th.

On Monday, the Debian project announced that it was renaming the former Custom Debian Distribution concept (the umbrella term under which Debian projects such as Debian Junior, Debian Med, and DebiChem were collectively known) to the more accurate (and catchier) name Debian Pure Blends.

Though Debian Pure Blends for some reason makes me think gourmet coffee, Andreas Tille of the Debian project makes a good deal of sense when he says that Custom Debian Distributions stated the obvious (yes, these projects use Debian code) without giving a clear picture of what the customizations were, or how closely they were related to the Debian base.