Backports integrated into Debian’s main archive

Debian, the base Linux distribution for lots of other distros (including the highly popular Ubuntu), announced today that the backports service for the next stable release of Debian (version 7, codenamed “Wheezy”) will be part of the main archive. Backports are packages mostly from the testing distribution (and in few cases from unstable too, e.g. security updates) recompiled in a stable environment so that they will run without new libraries (whenever it is possible) on the stable distribution of Debian. Whereas this service was provided in a separate archive, backports packages will be accessible from the regular pool starting with “Wheezy”.

Users of “Wheezy” will have to add the entry below to their sources.list file:

deb http://ftp.debian.org/debian/ wheezy-backports main

Debian users are asked to check their regular mirrors for backports and download the packages concerned from there.

Debian also gives a final note of caution, i.e. this change does not affect the current stable release of Debian (version 6, codenamed “Squeeze”).