Debian 6.0 Squeeze release due by the end of the year – maybe

News has arrived via Twitter (cheers ciderpunx), on the status of the next release of Debian, the distribution upon which other popular distros such as Simply Mepis and Ubuntu (and loads of others too. Ed.) are based and which is used extensively within Bristol Wireless.

The Debian release team recently announced the latest status of the next Debian release, codenamed Squeeze. The team just finished the work on some major parts, such as completing the changes to run init scripts in parallel, transition to eglibc into testing, GNOME 2.30 and KDE 4.4.3. The next big step is to make Python 2.6 the default python version for Sqeeeze; this could be finished sometime in late August and the release could then be frozen.

The freeze of Squeeze was originally planned for December 2009, meaning it’s already behind schedule. It appears that the Debian project is having difficulties switching to a fixed 2 year release (or freeze) cycle. This time the freeze was deferred due to the high number of critical bugs for a release freeze. Based on past experiences, at least 4 months will be required after the freeze to release the next stable version, meaning this could be available by the end of the year if all goes well, although the release date might be postponed until 2011.