The long-awaited next release of Debian is finally here: Debian 4.0 codenamed “Etch” was released today.
Debian releases are fairly infrequent (for good reason), so this is a big day in the Debian world. Some Linux users (especially some Ubuntu users) forget the importance of Debian to the whole community. I do use Ubuntu on various desktop PCs, but I never forget that it’s Debian under the hood. And every server I admin (home, work, hosted in a datacentre) runs Debian. This means that I will soon be uncovering the quirks relating to upgrading from the previous version (Sarge) to this new one. In the past, this has been relatively trouble-free, so let’s hope applies here too.
On a more personal note, the Etch release is the first release in which packages which I have maintained directly are part of the distribution: my utility colordiff has been part of Debian since the previous release, but I didn’t actually maintain the Debian packages at that stage. Woo.