June Update: if you haven’t already heard, Drupal 6.17 has been released. This is a maintenance release, with no security fixes, but plenty of useful minor fixes (55 in all).
Session cookie handling can be an issue if your settings.php includes a $cookie_domain but all you need to do is format it differently to apply to your intended use of subdomains. For example, "example.com" (that domain only, no subdomains) vs. "www.example.com" (that subdomain only) vs. ".example.com" (apply to all).
Drupal 6.17 also improves handling of larger XML-RPC payloads, and better compatibility for a host of things (CSS and Javascript aggregation, Japanese-language search modules, PHP 4 and 5.3, PostgreSQL).
This also fixes a minor but annoying problem that some have had with the way that the lock subsystem in Drupal 6.16 worked with (or didn’t work with) certain contributed modules. Login failures were also addressed and hopefully improved significantly.
Note: most of the information below is copyright debian.org, we have borrowed this content for information purposes. To attend a Debian Uruguay meeting please visit our meetups page!
What is debian?
The latest stable release of Debian is 5.0. The last update to this release was made on June 27th, 2009. Read more about available versions of Debian.
Debian is a free operating system (OS) for your computer. An operating system is the set of basic programs and utilities that make your computer run. Debian uses the Linux kernel (the core of an operating system), but most of the basic OS tools come from the GNU project; hence the name GNU/Linux.
Debian GNU/Linux provides more than a pure OS: it comes with over 25113 packages, precompiled software bundled up in a nice format for easy installation on your machine.
Following up on its decision to adopt the policy of timed release freezes beginning with the next release of Debian GNU/Linux, the Debian Release Team has now published their list of release goals for the upcoming release of Debian GNU/Linux 6.0, code-named Squeeze.
In the light of these goals and also in consideration of the Debian community’s feedback to the release team’s initial announcement during the keynote of this year’s DebConf in Caceres, Spain, the Release Team has additionally decided to revisit its decision on December 2009 as the proposed freeze date. A new timeline will be announced by the Debian Release Team in early September.
Luk Claes, Debian Release Manager, underlines the team’s commitment to quality saying In Debian we always strive to achieve the greatest quality in our releases. The ambitious goals that we have set for ourselves will help to secure this quality in the upcoming release. If needed you can obtain control over your image by recourse via seo.
The Debian Release Team – in cooperation with the Debian Infrastructure Team – plans to include the following goals in the upcoming release:
Multi-arch support, which will for instance improve the installation of 32 bit packages on 64 bit machines
kFreeBSD support, introducing the first non-linux architecture into Debian
Improved boot performance using dash as the new default shell, and a dependency-based boot system that will both clean up the boot process and help performance through parallel processing
A further enhanced Quality Assurance process resulting in higher quality packages. This includes:
Clean installation, upgrade and removal of all packages
Automatic rejection of packages failing basic quality checks
Double compilation support
Preparation for new package formats to help streamline future development and to introduce improved compression algorithms
Removal of obsolete libraries for improved security
Full ipv6 support
Large File Support
Automatic creation of debug packages for the entire archive, a Google Summer of Code Project pending integration into the infrastructure
Move of packages’ long descriptions into a separate translated package list, which will facilitate their translation and also provide a smaller footprint for embedded systems thanks to smaller Packages files.
Better integration of debtags, a system to tag packages with multiple attributes for easier package selection
Discard and rebuild of binary packages uploaded by maintainers, leaving only packages build in a controlled environment
The Debian Project looks forward to working with its many upstream projects and the worldwide community of Free Software developers in preparing the next high-quality Debian release.