Temporary suspension of testing security support after release of 5.0 (lenny)

Hi,

due to the experiences we made after the last stable Debian release, 
the Testing Security Team believes that it will be impossible to 
provide proper security support for the new testing 
(Debian "squeeze") in the weeks following the release of Debian 5.0 
(lenny).  Therefore we will temporarily suspend security support for 
Debian testing after the release.

If you need security support, we strongly recommend that you now 
change your apt sources.list entries to point to "lenny" instead 
of "testing".  This way you will automatically stay with "lenny" 
after its release as stable and will receive the normal security 
support for Debian stable.  After the begin of security support for 
Debian "squeeze" is announced, you may safely upgrade to testing 
again.


There are two reasons for this suspension:

After a stable release it will take some time to get the security 
related buildd infrastructure for the new testing in place.  Since 
many people will be busy celebrating the release, we don't know how 
long this will take ;-)

In addition to that, we expect that shortly after the release a new 
libc version will be uploaded to unstable, which will block most 
packages from migrating from unstable to testing.  This means that no 
security fixes will reach testing from unstable.  Since the Testing 
Security Team does not have enough members to backport all security 
fixes to testing, it will be impossible to provide proper security 
support.  After the last stable release (etch) it took nearly two 
months until the new glibc reached testing.

On the other hand, libc blocking most packages from migrating to 
testing also means that the difference between stable and testing 
will not grow quickly in the weeks after lenny release.  Therefore 
staying with stable should be an acceptable solution for most users 
during that time.  If you absolutely need newer packages, you may 
also consider using unstable instead of testing.


The Testing Security Team