Debian 8.0 To Be Frozen, Features Announced

The Debian Release Team has announced the Debian 8.0 "Jessie" freeze date along with the proposed release goals for this next major update to the Debian Linux distribution that also continues to maintain a FreeBSD kernel option. The Debian 8.0 news came just a short time after releasing Debian 7.2. Debian Jessie will look to expand upon systemd support and LLVM's Clang as a secondary compiler option to GCC.

Debian will be frozen for Jessie beginning the night of 5 November 2014. This freeze date in just over one year will allow Debian developers to focus on bug-fixing and meeting Jessie's goals for the successor to Debian 7 Wheezy. The actual Debian 8 release will not come for quite some time after the 5 November freeze, likely to happen in 2015.

Among the proposed release goals for Debian Jessie is to have native systemd support for every Debian package that currently contains sysv scripts, hardening of ELF binaries, debian/rules to honor CC/CXX flags, Clang support as a secondary compiler, Piuparts clean archive, cross toolchains in the archive, making the base system cross-buildable, SELinux support, and UTF-8 support.

While these are only proposed goals for Debian 8.0, the most interesting ones are having systemd support to complement sysv scripts, Clang support as a secondary compiler, and Security Enhanced Linux (SELinux) support. Systemd won't be made the default init system but it's nice to see the support optionally coming and being expanded upon within the Debian world. Having LLVM's Clang complement GCC is also very interesting and has been worked on for quite some time.

More details on the latest Debian Jessie information can be found via the debian-devel-announce mailing list.