Debian developers publish the Stretch preparation report and disable FTP support on their servers.

The other day, the Debian development team has published a regular report on the preparation and results of the work on the next Debian branch - “Stretch”. Today, the Debian 9 package base has been in a “freeze” for almost three months. The reason - a quick release with the stop transfer of unstable packages to testing. As for the new release, the developers have counted 143 critical errors for its formation. Unfortunately, the exact release date is unknown. Developers talk about "the beginning of summer", but this is also inaccurate.

In order to form a release on time (which, it is true, they are regularly postponed), the developers decided for the time being to remove the provision of support for UEFI Secure Boot from the category of critical blocking releases. Apparently, there are fears that the team, not having time to prepare everything in time, may make mistakes in the development, less carefully checking their work. Therefore, as far as can be judged, Debian 9 will not have support for UEFI Secure Boot at the time of release. It will be added later when developers are a little less loaded.

In addition, developers receive other news. For example, it was decided not to create a complete set of images on a Debian CD. This set includes about 80 disks and, for obvious reasons, they are not very readily disassembled by users. Also, limited installation assemblies on CDs with different desktops will no longer be produced. The team decided to keep only the image on the same disk as the Xfce desktop and the build for downloading packages over the network. As for other formats, including DVD, Blu-Ray (BD) and dual-layer Blue-Ray, such assemblies will continue to be released.

Plus, now they will again form live-builds, releasing them every week. This concerns, first of all, the amd64 and i386 architectures. Such builds will include the GNOME, KDE, Cinnamon, Mate, Xfce and LXDE desktops. It is worth noting that in the new Live-builds there is support for downloading on systems with UEFI. There were also builds for deploying cloud systems, so far OpenStack for ARM64. Plus there are unofficial builds with non-free firmware. They are formed in various forms, including live-build, assembly for work on the network and DVD.
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As for its work, Debian refuses to support File Transfer Protocol (FTP) on its servers. The reason is that few people work with them, but support takes time and effort. So ftp.debian.org and security.debian.org will no longer work. The team said the following about this: “FTP does not support caching and acceleration,” and the “protocol is inefficient and requires complex settings to configure firewalls and configure daemons.” True, ftp.upload.debian.org and security-master.debian.org will be supported for some time. But public services will be removed from November 1, 2017.