Debian AMD64 Sarge released

Hi

Just following the "big" Release we have a small one to announce:
Debian AMD64 Port is now (since Wednesday, 8th June 2005) also declaredstable. From now on there will be no changes to this archive, exceptfor point releases which will be coordinated closely with the Debianones.

CD and DVD images will be made available on cdimage.debian.org, trycdimage.debian.org/cdimage/unofficial/sarge-amd64/ as soon as theimages are built, which should be today or tomorrow.

Security Support for this release will be provided by the Debian
Security Team via security.debian.org. Our security autobuilder will
start this weekend. Should there be any DSA for sarge before that day we
will provide it manually until then (but we dont expect this to happen
at the moment).

To make this support happen we agreed to some conditions, which
include "Only a very minimal set of packages is allowed to be patched
for AMD64 support". We achieved this by strict rules for uploads and
dropping some packages that need large amounts of patches or work to
be done to compile or run on AMD64 systems. We are now down to 8
packages that are not in sync with Debian, with candidates like
syslinux, linux86 and also base-config/choose-mirror (to use our
mirror list). In total, the list of packages removed from our archive
is much bigger - a few hundred. We compiled a list of these for the
security team to work with, but it may also be useful for other
people. It is available under
http://amd64.debian.net/docs/package_changes.txt if you want to take a
look.

We do plan to support those packages, if there is someone from the
porting team or even the maintainers themselves willing to work on
it. We will provide a sarge-patched (or similar named) repository in
our archive, which will contain most of those packages, patched to
work on amd64. But please note: They DO NOT have official security
support. Usually the one maintaining the package in this section will
keep it uptodate, but if you have some hard security policy - please
do not rely on this!

If you visit packages.debian.org and search for a package you will
notice (since a few weeks ago) that it also lists the amd64 versions,
including links to download the packages from one of our mirrors.
This will continue to work for sarge, but may break for short times
while amd64 gets integrated into the main Debian archive. If you see
that then please be patient.

Now, talk about the future: etch and sid, testing and unstable. We
will continue to track these two releases until AMD64 is in Debian and
the buildd stats show that it has built more than 95% of the
archive. Around that day we will discontinue our etch and sid support,
but will post a short announcement to this list when that happens.
(http://buildd.debian.org/stats/)

Other interesting links:

http://amd64.debian.net/docs - contains our release notes for now, will
 get Faq/Howto/Whatever else also.
http://amd64.ftbfs.de/ - If you are searching for a build log of a
 package on amd64, this is your place for
 now.

Finally please let me say thank you to all the people who support our
architecture by making services and bandwith available to us. We do
appreciate your support!


-- 
bye Joerg