Debian freezes over

We've been following the progress of Debian's upcoming stable release ("Sarge") for some time, and now is a good time to check in on Debian's progress. Let me preface this by saying that I'm a big fan of Debian, the distribution and the community that actually produces the distro. Having said that, I have occasionally wondered whether Debian Sarge will report for duty before Microsoft's "Longhorn."

The prognosis is good, finally. Steve Langasek has announced that Sarge is frozen, which means that it won't be too much longer before Sarge finally makes it out the door. We hope. To put that in perspective, Woody (the current Debian release) was frozen on July 1, 2001 and finally released July 19, 2002. Since this is actually Sarge's second freeze, it looks likely that Sarge will be delivered before summer.

The schedule for Sarge calls for a bug squashing party this weekend to get rid of release-blocking bugs in Sarge, and a final release at the end of this month. It's likely there will be some slippage there, but I'd place good money on seeing a Debian release by mid-June. Any takers?