
                      A Brief History of Debian


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                     version: 14.1 (2026-08-12)

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Copyright © 1999-2020 Debian Documentation Team <
debian-doc@lists.debian.org>

Copyright © 2023 Debian Publicity Team <
debian-publicity@lists.debian.org>

                        Debian Publicity Team

                 <debian-publicity@lists.debian.org>

    This document may be freely redistributed or modified in any form
    provided your changes are clearly documented.

    This document may be redistributed for fee or free, and may be
    modified (including translation from one type of media or file
    format to another or from one spoken language to another)
    provided that all changes from the original are clearly marked as
    such.

    Significant contributions were made to this document by

      * Javier Fernández-Sanguino <jfs@debian.org>

      * Bdale Garbee <bdale@debian.org>

      * Hartmut Koptein <koptein@debian.org>

      * Nils Lohner <lohner@debian.org>

      * Will Lowe <lowe@debian.org>

      * Bill Mitchell <Bill.Mitchell@pobox.com>

      * Ian Murdock

      * Martin Schulze <joey@debian.org>

      * Craig Small <csmall@debian.org>

Abstract

This document describes the history and goals of the Debian project.

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Table of Contents

1. Introduction -- What is the Debian Project?
    1.1. In the Beginning
    1.2. Pronouncing Debian
2. Leadership
3. Debian Releases
4. A Detailed History
    4.1. The 0.x Releases
    4.2. The Early Debian Packaging System
    4.3. The 1.x Releases
    4.4. The 2.x Releases
    4.5. The 3.x Releases
    4.6. The 4.x Releases
    4.7. The 5.x Releases
    4.8. The 6.x Releases
    4.9. The 7.x Releases
    4.10. The 8.x Releases
    4.11. The 9.x Releases
    4.12. The 10.x Releases
    4.13. The 11.x Releases
5. Some Important Events
    5.1. October 2000: Implementation of Package Pools
    5.2. November 2002: Fire burnt Debian server
    5.3. November 2003: Several Debian servers hacked
6. Remembering People We Have Lost
    6.1. July 2000: Joel Klecker died
    6.2. March 2001: Christopher Rutter died
    6.3. March 2001: Fabrizio Polacco died
    6.4. July 2002: Martin Butterweck died
    6.5. May 2004: Manuel Estrada Sainz and Andrés García Solier died
    6.6. July 2005: Jens Schmalzing died
    6.7. December 2008: Thiemo Seufer died
    6.8. July 2009: Steve Greenland died
    6.9. August 2010: Frans Pop died
    6.10. April 2011: Adrian von Bidder died
    6.11. May 2013: Ray Dassen died
    6.12. June 2013: Paul Cupis died
    6.13. July 2014: Peter Miller died
    6.14. February 2015: Clytie Siddall died
    6.15. December 2015: Ian Murdock died
    6.16. September 2016: Kristoffer H. Rose died
    6.17. September 2018: Innocent de Marchi died
    6.18. March 2019: Lucy Wayland died
    6.19. June 2020: Robert Lemmen died
    6.20. June 2020: Karl Ramm died
    6.21. January 2021: Adam Conrad died
    6.22. April 2021: Rogério Theodoro de Brito died
    6.23. September 2023: Abraham Raji died
    6.24. December 2023: Gunnar Hjalmarsson died
    6.25. July 2024: Peter De Schrijver died
    6.26. November 2024: Jérémy Bobbio died
    6.27. January 2025: Steve Langasek died
7. What's Next?
A. The Debian Manifesto
    A.1. What is Debian Linux?
    A.2. Why is Debian being constructed?
    A.3. How will Debian attempt to put an end to these problems?

Chapter 1. Introduction -- What is the Debian Project?

    The Debian Project is a worldwide group of volunteers who
    endeavor to produce an operating system distribution that is
    composed entirely of free software. The principle product of the
    project to date is the Debian GNU/Linux software distribution,
    which includes the Linux operating system kernel, and thousands
    of prepackaged applications. Various processor types are
    supported to one extent or another, including 32 and 64 bit x86,
    ARM, MIPS, PowerPC and IBM S/390.

    Debian motivated the formation of Software in the Public
    Interest, Inc., a New York-based non-profit organization. SPI was
    founded to help Debian and other similar organizations develop
    and distribute open hardware and software. Among other things,
    SPI provides a mechanism by which The Debian Project may accept
    contributions that are tax deductible in the United States.

    For more information about free software, see the Debian Social
    Contract and associated Debian Free Software Guidelines, or the
    Debian What Does Free Mean? page.

1.1. In the Beginning

    The Debian Project was officially founded by Ian Murdock on
    August 16th, 1993. (There is also a scanned printout of that
    announcement.) At that time, the whole concept of a
    "distribution" of Linux was new. Ian intended Debian to be a
    distribution which would be made openly, in the spirit of Linux
    and GNU (read his manifesto provided as an appendix to this
    document for more details). The creation of Debian was sponsored
    by the FSF's GNU project for one year (November 1994 to November
    1995).

    Debian was meant to be carefully and conscientiously put
    together, and to be maintained and supported with similar care.
    It started as a small, tightly-knit group of Free Software
    hackers, and gradually grew to become a large, well-organized
    community of developers and users.

    When it began, Debian was the only distribution that was open for
    every developer and user to contribute their work. It remains the
    most significant distributor of Linux that is not a commercial
    entity. It is the only large project with a constitution, social
    contract, and policy documents to organize the project. Debian is
    also the only distribution which is "micro packaged" using
    detailed dependency information regarding inter-package
    relationships to ensure system consistency across upgrades.

    To achieve and maintain high standards of quality, Debian has
    adopted an extensive set of policies and procedures for packaging
    and delivering software. These standards are backed up by tools,
    automation, and documentation implementing all of Debian's key
    elements in an open and visible way.

1.2. Pronouncing Debian

    The official pronunciation of Debian is 'deb ee n'. The name
    comes from the names of the creator of Debian, Ian Murdock, and
    his wife, Debra.

Chapter 2. Leadership

    Debian has had several leaders since its beginnings in 1993.

    Ian Murdock founded Debian in August 1993 and led it until March
    1996.

    Bruce Perens led Debian from April 1996 until December 1997.

    Ian Jackson led Debian from January 1998 until December 1998.

    Wichert Akkerman led Debian from January 1999 until March 2001.

    Ben Collins led Debian from April 2001 until April 2002.

    Bdale Garbee led Debian from April 2002 until April 2003.

    Martin Michlmayr led Debian from March 2003 until March 2005.

    Branden Robinson led Debian from April 2005 until April 2006.

    Anthony Towns led Debian from April 2006 until April 2007.

    Sam Hocevar led Debian from April 2007 until April 2008.

    Steve McIntyre led Debian from April 2008 until April 2010.

    Stefano Zacchiroli led Debian from April 2010 until April 2013.

    Lucas Nussbaum led Debian from April 2013 until April 2015.

    Neil McGovern led Debian from April 2015 until April 2016.

    Mehdi Dogguy led Debian from April 2016 until April 2017.

    Chris Lamb led Debian from April 2017 until April 2019.

    Sam Hartman led Debian from April 2019 until April 2020.

    Jonathan Carter led Debian from April 2020 until April 2024.

    Andreas Tille led Debian from April 2024 until April 2026.

    Sruthi Chandran was elected in April 2026 and is our current
    leader.

Chapter 3. Debian Releases

    Debian 0.01 through 0.90 (August-December 1993)

    Debian 0.91 (January 1994): This release had a simple package
    system which could install and uninstall packages. The project
    had grown to several dozen people at this point.

    Debian 0.93R5 (March 1995): Responsibility for each package was
    clearly assigned to a developer by this point, and the package
    manager (dpkg) was used to install packages after the
    installation of a base system.

    Debian 0.93R6 (November 1995): dselect appears. This was the last
    Debian release using the a.out binary format; there were about 60
    developers. The first master.debian.org server was built by Bdale
    Garbee and hosted by HP in parallel with the 0.93R6 release. The
    deployment of an explicit master server on which Debian
    developers would construct each release led directly to the
    formation of the Debian mirror network, and indirectly to the
    development of many of the policies and procedures used to manage
    the project today.

    Debian 1.0 was never released: InfoMagic, a CD vendor,
    accidentally shipped a development release of Debian and entitled
    it 1.0. On December 11th 1995, Debian and InfoMagic jointly
    announced that this release was screwed. Bruce Perens explains
    that the data placed on the "InfoMagic Linux Developer's Resource
    5-CD Set November 1995" as "Debian 1.0" is not the Debian 1.0
    release, but an early development version which is only partially
    in the ELF format, will probably not boot or run correctly, and
    does not represent the quality of a released Debian system. To
    prevent confusion between the premature CD version and the actual
    Debian release, the Debian Project has renamed its next release
    to "Debian 1.1". The premature Debian 1.0 on CD is deprecated and
    should not be used.

    The hosting of master.debian.org moved from HP to i-Connect.Net
    around the end of 1995. Michael Neuffer and Shimon Shapiro,
    founders of i-Connect.Net, hosted master on their own hardware
    for a little more than a year. During this time, they provided
    many services to Debian, including running what was essentially
    the New Maintainer process of the day, and significantly aiding
    the growth of the early Debian mirror network.

    Debian 1.1 Buzz (June 17th, 1996): This was the first Debian
    release with a code name. It was taken, like all others so far,
    from a character in one of the Toy Story movies... in this case,
    Buzz Lightyear. By this time, Bruce Perens had taken over
    leadership of the Project from Ian Murdock, and Bruce was working
    at Pixar, the company that produced the movies. This release was
    fully ELF, used Linux kernel 2.0, and contained 474 packages.

    Debian 1.2 Rex (December 12th, 1996): Named for the plastic
    dinosaur in the Toy Story movies. This release consisted of 848
    packages maintained by 120 developers

    Debian 1.3 Bo (June 5th, 1997): Named for Bo Peep, the
    shepherdess. This release consisted of 974 packages maintained by
    200 developers.

    Debian 2.0 Hamm (July 24th, 1998): Named for the piggy-bank in
    the Toy Story movies. This was the first multi-architecture
    release of Debian, adding support for the Motorola 68000 series
    architectures. With Ian Jackson as Project Leader, this release
    made the transition to libc6, and consisted of over 1500 packages
    maintained by over 400 developers.

    Debian 2.1 Slink (March 9th, 1999): Named for the slinky-dog in
    the movie. Two more architectures were added, Alpha and SPARC.
    With Wichert Akkerman as Project Leader, this release consisted
    of about 2250 packages and required 2 CDs in the official set.
    The key technical innovation was the introduction of apt, a new
    package management interface. Widely emulated, apt addressed
    issues resulting from Debian's continuing growth, and established
    a new paradigm for package acquisition and installation on Open
    Source operating systems.

    Debian 2.2 Potato (15 August 2000): Named for "Mr Potato Head" in
    the Toy Story movies. This release added support for the PowerPC
    and ARM architectures. With Wichert still serving as Project
    Leader, this release consisted of more than 3900 binary packages
    derived from over 2600 source packages maintained by more than
    450 Debian developers.

    Debian 3.0 Woody (19 July 2002): Named for the main character the
    Toy Story movies: "Woody" the cowboy. Even more architectures
    were added in this release: IA-64, HP PA-RISC, MIPS (big endian),
    MIPS (little endian) and S/390. This is also the first release to
    include cryptographic software due to the restrictions for
    exportation being lightened in the US, and also the first one to
    include KDE, now that the license issues with Qt were resolved.
    With Bdale Garbee recently appointed Project Leader, and more
    than 900 Debian developers, this release contained around 8,500
    binary packages and 7 binary CDs in the official set.

    Debian 3.1 Sarge (6 June 2005): named for the sergeant of the
    Green Plastic Army Men. No new architectures were added to the
    release, although an unofficial AMD64 port was published at the
    same time and distributed through the new Alioth project hosting
    site. This release features a new installer: debian-installer, a
    modular piece of software that feature automatic hardware
    detection, unattended installation features and was released
    fully translated to over thirty languages. It was also the first
    release to include a full office suite: OpenOffice.org. Branden
    Robinson had just been appointed as Project Leader. This release
    was made by more than nine hundred Debian developers, and
    contained around 15,400 binary packages and 14 binary CDs in the
    official set.

    Debian 4.0 Etch (8 April 2007): named for the sketch toy in the
    movie. One architecture was added in this release: AMD64, and
    official support for m68k was dropped. This release continued
    using the debian-installer, but featuring in this release a
    graphical installer, cryptographic verification of downloaded
    packages, more flexible partitioning (with support for encrypted
    partitions), simplified mail configuration, a more flexible
    desktop selection, simplified but improved localization and new
    modes, including a rescue mode. New installations would not need
    to reboot through the installation process as the previous two
    phases of installation were now integrated. This new installer
    provided support for scripts using composed characters and
    complex languages in its graphical version, increasing the number
    of available translations to over fifty. Sam Hocevar was
    appointed Project Leader the very same day, and the project
    included more than one thousand and thirty Debian developers. The
    release contained around 18,000 binary packages over 20 binary
    CDs (3 DVDs) in the official set. There were also two binary CDs
    available to install the system with alternate desktop
    environments different to the default one.

    Debian 5.0 Lenny (February 2009): named for the wind up
    binoculars in the Toy Story movies. One architecture was added in
    this release: ARM EABI (or armel), providing support for newer
    ARM processors and deprecating the old ARM port (arm). The m68k
    port was not included in this release, although it was still
    provided in the unstable distribution. This release did not
    feature the FreeBSD port, although much work on the port had been
    done to make it qualify it did not meet yet the qualification
    requirements for this release.

    Support of small factor devices in this release was increased by
    the added support for Marvell's Orion platform which was used in
    many storage devices and also provided supported several
    Netbooks. Some new build tools were added which allowed Debian
    packages to be cross-built and shrunk for embedded ARM systems.
    Also, netbooks of varied vendors were now supported and the
    distribution provided software more suitable for computers with
    relatively low performance.

    It was also the first release to provide free versions of Sun's
    Java technology, making it possible to provide Java applications
    in the main section.

    Debian 6.0 Squeeze (February 2011): named for the green
    three-eyed aliens.

    The release was frozen on August 6, 2010, with many of the Debian
    developers gathered at the 10th DebConf at New York City.

    While two architectures (alpha and hppa) were dropped, two
    architectures of the new FreeBSD port (kfreebsd-i386 and
    kfreebsd-amd64) were made available as technology preview,
    including the kernel and userland tools as well as common server
    software (though not advanced desktop features yet). This was the
    first time a Linux distribution has been extended to also allow
    use of a non-Linux kernel.

    The new release introduced a dependency based boot sequence,
    which allowed for parallel init script processing, speeding
    system startup.

    Debian 6 was the first release that benefited from Long Term
    Support (LTS), a project to extend the lifetime of all Debian
    stable releases to (at least) 5 years. Debian LTS was not handled
    by the Debian Security team, but by a separate group of
    volunteers and companies interested in making it a success.
    Debian 6 was supported until the end of February 2016, and
    limited to i386 and amd64 architectures.

    Debian 7.0 Wheezy (May 2013): named for the rubber toy penguin
    with a red bow tie.

    The release was frozen on June 30, 2012, very close to the Debian
    developers gathering in the 12th DebConf at Managua, Nicaragua.

    One architecture was included in this release (armhf) and this
    release introduced multi-arch support, which allowed users to
    install packages from multiple architectures on the same machine.
    Improvements in the installation process allowed visually
    impaired people to install the system using software speech for
    the first time.

    This was also the first release that supported the installation
    and booting in devices using UEFI firmware.

    Debian 7 had Long Term Support (LTS) for i386, amd64, armel and
    armhf architectures until the end of May 2018.

    Debian 8 Jessie (April 2015): named for the cow girl doll who
    first appeared in Toy Story 2.

    This release introduced for the first time the systemd init
    system as default. Two new architectures were introduced: arm64
    and ppc64el and three architectures were dropped: s390 (replaced
    by s390x), ia64 and sparc. The Sparc architecture had been
    present in Debian for 16 years, but lacked developer support to
    make it maintainable in the distribution.

    The release included many security improvements such as a new
    kernel that nullified a whole set of security vulnerabilities
    (symlink attacks), a new way to detect packages which were under
    security support, more packages built with hardened compiler
    flags and a new mechanism (needrestart) to detect sub-systems
    which had to be restarted in order to propagate security updates
    after an upgrade.

    Debian 8 had Long Term Support (LTS) for i386, amd64, armel and
    armhf architectures until the end of June 2020.

    Debian 9 Stretch (June 2017): named for the toy rubber octopus
    with suckers on her eight long arms that appeared in Toy Story 3.

    The release was frozen on February 7th, 2017.

    Debian 9 was dedicated to the project's founder Ian Murdock, who
    passed away on 28 December 2015.

    Support for the powerpc architecture was dropped in this release,
    whileas the mips64el architecture was introduced. This release
    introduced debug packages with a new repository in the archive,
    packages from this repository provided debug symbols
    automatically for packages. Firefox and Thunderbird returned to
    Debian, replacing their debranded versions Iceweasel and Icedove,
    which were present in the archive for more than 10 years. Thanks
    to the Reproducible Builds project, over 90% of the source
    packages included in Debian 9 were able to build bit-for-bit
    identical binary packages.

    Debian 9 had Long Term Support (LTS) for i386, amd64, armel and
    armhf architectures until the end of June 2022.

    Debian 10 Buster (July 2019): named for Andy's pet dog, received
    as Christmas present in the end of Toy Story.

    With this release Debian for the first time included a mandatory
    access control framework enabled per default (AppArmor). It was
    also the first Debian release to ship with Rust based programs
    such as Firefox, ripgrep, fd, exa, etc. and a significant number
    of Rust based libraries (more than 450). In Debian 10 GNOME
    defaults to using the Wayland display server instead of Xorg,
    providing a simpler and more modern design and advantages for
    security. The UEFI ("Unified Extensible Firmware Interface")
    support first introduced in Debian 7 continued to be greatly
    improved in Debian 10, being included for amd64, i386 and arm64
    architectures and working out of the box on most Secure
    Boot-enabled machines.

    Debian 10 had Long Term Support (LTS) for i386, amd64, armel and
    armhf architectures until the end of June 2024.

    Debian 11 Bullseye (August 14th, 2021): named for Woody's wooden
    toyhorse that appeared in Toy Story 2.

    This release contained over 11,294 new packages for a total count
    of 59,551 packages, along with a significant reduction of over
    9,519 packages which were marked as "obsolete" and removed.
    42,821 packages were updated and 5,434 packages remained
    unchanged.

    Debian 11 allowed driverless printing and scanning without the
    need for vendor specific (often non-free) drivers, and shipped a
    Linux kernel with support for the exFAT filesystem. The mips
    architecture support was dropped, keeping support for mipsel
    (little-endian) architectures for 32-bit hardware and mips64el
    architecture for 64-bit little-endian hardware.

    The Debian Med team took part in the fight against COVID-19 by
    packaging software for researching the virus on the sequence
    level and for fighting the pandemic with the tools used in
    epidemiology; this work continued with focus on machine learning
    tools for both fields.

    Debian 12 Bookworm (June 10th, 2023): named for a green toy worm
    with a built-in flashlight that appeared in Toy Story 3.

    This release contained over 11,089 new packages for a total count
    of 64,419 packages, while over 6,296 packages have been removed
    as "obsolete". 43,254 packages were updated in this release. The
    overall disk usage for bookworm is 365,016,420 kB (365 GB), and
    is made up of 1,341,564,204 lines of code.

    Following the 2022 General Resolution about non-free firmware,
    the Debian Social Contract got adjusted and a new archive area
    called non-free-firmware got introduced, making it possible to
    separate non-free firmware from the other non-free packages. Most
    non-free firmware packages have been moved from non-free to 
    non-free-firmware. This separation makes it possible to build a
    variety of official installation images. And it makes installing
    Debian on popular hardware using the official Debian installer
    much easier.

    A total of nine architectures are officially supported for 
    bookworm.

    The Debian Cloud team publishes bookworm for three popular cloud
    computing services.

    Between releases, in Bug#978636 (Feb 2021), the Technical
    Committee resolved that Debian bookworm would support only the
    merged-usr^[1] root filesystem layout, dropping support for the
    non-merged-usr layout. For systems installed as buster or 
    bullseye there would be no changes to the filesystem; however,
    systems using the older layout would be converted during the
    upgrade.

    Thanks to the combined work of the Debian Security team and the
    Debian Long Term Support team, bookworm will be supported on four
    architectures until June 2028 (5 years after release).

    Debian 13 Trixie (as of August 2024 the testing distribution):
    Trixie is a blue toy Triceratops that appeared in Toy Story 3.


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    ^[1] usr-merge (or merged-usr or /usr-move) is a filesystem
    layout where the traditional unix directories /bin, /sbin, /lib
    and /lib64 are replaced by symbolic links to their counterparts
    under /usr. So e.g. /bin is replaced by a symlink to /usr/bin .
    In 2012, usr-merge was implemented by Fedora Linux as well as by
    Ubuntu Linux. See also The Case For The Usr Merge and the
    Bookworm Release Notes.

Chapter 4. A Detailed History

4.1. The 0.x Releases

    Debian was begun in August 1993 by Ian Murdock, then an
    undergraduate at Purdue University. Debian was sponsored by the
    GNU Project of The Free Software Foundation, the organization
    started by Richard Stallman and associated with the General
    Public License (GPL), for one year -- from November 1994 to
    November 1995.

    Debian 0.01 through Debian 0.90 were released between August and
    December of 1993. Ian Murdock writes:

    "Debian 0.91 was released in January 1994. It had a primitive
    package system that allowed users to manipulate packages but that
    did little else (it certainly didn't have dependencies or
    anything like that). By this time, there were a few dozen people
    working on Debian, though I was still mostly putting together the
    releases myself. 0.91 was the last release done in this way.

    Most of 1994 was spent organizing the Debian Project so that
    others could more effectively contribute, as well as working on 
    dpkg (Ian Jackson was largely responsible for this). There were
    no releases to the public in 1994 that I can remember, though
    there were several internal releases as we worked to get the
    process right.

    Debian 0.93 Release 5 happened in March 1995 and was the first
    "modern" release of Debian: there were many more developers by
    then (though I can't remember exactly how many), each maintaining
    their own packages, and dpkg was being used to install and
    maintain all these packages after a base system was installed.

    Debian 0.93 Release 6 happened in November 1995 and was the last
    a.out release. There were about sixty developers maintaining
    packages in 0.93R6. If I remember correctly, dselect first
    appeared in 0.93R6."

    Ian Murdock also notes that Debian 0.93R6 "... has always been my
    favorite release of Debian", although he admits to the
    possibility of some personal bias, as he stopped actively working
    on the project in March 1996 during the pre-production of Debian
    1.0, which was actually released as Debian 1.1 to avoid confusion
    after a CD-ROM manufacturer mistakenly labelled an unreleased
    version as Debian 1.0. That incident led to the concept of
    "official" CD-ROM images, as a way for the project to help
    vendors avoid this kind of mistake.

    During August 1995 (between Debian 0.93 Release 5 and Debian 0.93
    Release 6), Hartmut Koptein started the first port for Debian,
    for the Motorola m68k family. He reports that "Many, many
    packages were i386-centric (little endian, -m486, -O6 and all for
    libc4) and it was a hard time to get a starting base of packages
    on my machine (an Atari Medusa 68040, 32 MHz). After three months
    (in November 1995), I uploaded 200 packages from 250 available
    packages, all for libc5!" Later he started another port together
    with Vincent Renardias and Martin Schulze, for the PowerPC
    family.

    Since this time, the Debian Project has grown to include several
    ports to other architectures, a port to a new (non-Linux) kernel,
    the GNU Hurd microkernel, and at least one flavor of BSD kernel.

    An early member of the project, Bill Mitchell, remembers the
    Linux kernel

    "... being between 0.99r8 and 0.99r15 when we got started. For a
    long time, I could build the kernel in less than 30 minutes on a
    20 MHz 386-based machine, and could also do a Debian install in
    that same amount of time in under 10Mb of disk space.

    " ... I recall the initial group as including Ian Murdock,
    myself, Ian Jackson, another Ian who's surname I don't recall,
    Dan Quinlan, and some other people who's names I don't recall.
    Matt Welsh was either part of the initial group or joined pretty
    early on (he has since left the project). Someone set up a
    mailing list, and we were off and running.

    As I recall, we didn't start off with a plan, and we didn't start
    off by putting together a plan in any highly organized fashion.
    Right from the start, I do recall, we started off collecting up
    sources for a pretty random collection of packages. Over time, we
    came to focus on a collection of items which would be required to
    put together the core of a distribution: the kernel, a shell,
    update, getty, various other programs and support files needed to
    init the system, and a set of core utilities."

4.2. The Early Debian Packaging System

    At the very early stages of the Project, members considered
    distributing source-only packages. Each package would consist of
    the upstream source code and a Debianized patch file, and users
    would untar the sources, apply the patches, and compile binaries
    themselves. They soon realized, however, that some sort of binary
    distribution scheme would be needed. The earliest packaging tool,
    written by Ian Murdock and called dpkg, created a package in a
    Debian-specific binary format, and could be used later to unpack
    and install the files in the package.

    Ian Jackson soon took over the development of the packaging tool,
    renaming the tool itself dpkg-deb and writing a front-end program
    he named dpkg to facilitate the use of dpkg-deb and provide the 
    Dependencies and Conflicts of today's Debian system. The packages
    produced by these tools had a header listing the version of the
    tool used to create the package and an offset within the file to
    a tar-produced archive, which was separated from the header by
    some control information.

    At about this time some debate arose between members of the
    project -- some felt that the Debian-specific format created by 
    dpkg-deb should be dropped in favor of the format produced by the
    ar program. After several revised file formats and
    correspondingly-revised packaging tools, the ar format was
    adopted. The key value of this change is that it makes it
    possible for a Debian package to be un-packaged on any Unix-like
    system without the need to run an untrusted executable. In other
    words, only standard tools present on every Unix system like 'ar'
    and 'tar' are required to unpack a Debian binary package and
    examine the contents.

4.3. The 1.x Releases

    When Ian Murdock left Debian, he appointed Bruce Perens as the
    next leader of the project. Bruce first became interested in
    Debian while he was attempting to create a Linux distribution CD
    to be called "Linux for Hams", which would include all of the
    Linux software useful to ham radio operators. Finding that the
    Debian core system would require much further work to support his
    project, Bruce ended up working heavily on the base Linux system
    and related installation tools, postponing his ham radio
    distribution, including organizing (with Ian Murdock) the first
    set of Debian install scripts, eventually resulting in the Debian
    Rescue Floppy that was a core component of the Debian
    installation toolset for several releases.

    Ian Murdock states:

    "Bruce was the natural choice to succeed me, as he had been
    maintaining the base system for nearly a year, and he had been
    picking up the slack as the amount of time I could devote to
    Debian declined rapidly."

    He initiated several important facets of the project, including
    coordinating the effort to produce the Debian Free Software
    Guidelines and the Debian Social Contract, and initiating an Open
    Hardware Project. During his time as Project Leader, Debian
    gained market share and a reputation as a platform for serious,
    technically-capable Linux users.

    Bruce Perens also spearheaded the effort to create Software in
    the Public Interest, Inc.. Originally intended to provide the
    Debian Project with a legal entity capable of accepting
    donations, its aims quickly expanded to include supporting free
    software projects outside the Debian Project.

    The following Debian versions were released during this time:

      * 1.1 Buzz released June 1996 (474 packages, 2.0 kernel, fully
        ELF, dpkg)
   
      * 1.2 Rex released December 1996 (848 packages, 120 developers)

      * 1.3 Bo released July 1997 (974 packages, 200 developers)

    There were several interim "point" releases made to 1.3, with the
    last being 1.3.1R6.

    Bruce Perens was replaced by Ian Jackson as Debian Project Leader
    at the beginning of January, 1998, after leading the project much
    of the way through the preparation for the 2.0 release.

4.4. The 2.x Releases

    Ian Jackson became the Leader of the Debian Project at the
    beginning of 1998, and was shortly thereafter added to the board
    of Software in the Public Interest in the capacity of Vice
    President. After the resignation of the Treasurer (Tim Sailer),
    President (Bruce Perens), and Secretary (Ian Murdock), he became
    President of the Board and three new members were chosen: Martin
    Schulze (Vice President), Dale Scheetz (Secretary), and Nils
    Lohner (Treasurer).

    Debian 2.0 (Hamm) was released July 1998 for the Intel i386 and
    Motorola 68000 series architectures. This release marked the move
    to a new version of the system C libraries (glibc2 or for
    historical reasons libc6). At the time of release, there were
    1500+ packages maintained by more than 400 Debian developers.

    Wichert Akkerman succeeded Ian Jackson as Debian Project Leader
    in January of 1999. Debian 2.1 was released on 09 March, 1999,
    after being delayed by a week when a few last-minute issues
    arose.

    Debian 2.1 (Slink) featured official support for two new
    architectures: Alpha and Sparc. The X-Windows packages included
    with Debian 2.1 were greatly reorganized from previous releases,
    and 2.1 included apt, the next-generation Debian package manager
    interface. Also, this release of Debian was the first to require
    2 CD-ROMs for the "Official Debian CD set"; the distribution
    included about 2250 packages.

    On 21 April 1999, Corel Corporation and the K Desktop Project
    effectively formed an alliance with Debian when Corel announced
    its intentions to release a Linux distribution based on Debian
    and the desktop environment produced by the KDE group. During the
    following spring and summer months, another Debian-based
    distribution, Storm Linux, appeared, and the Debian Project chose
    a new logo, featuring both an Official version for use on
    Debian-sanctioned materials such as CD-ROMs and official Project
    web sites, and an Unofficial logo for use on material mentioning
    or derived from Debian.

    A new, unique, Debian port also began at this time, for the Hurd
    port. This is the first port to use a non-Linux kernel, instead
    using the GNU Hurd, a version of the GNU Mach microkernel.

    Debian developers joined formally for the first time in an annual
    meeting called DebConf. The first meeting, called Debconf0, took
    place in Bordeaux, France from the 5th to the 9th of July 2000.
    The conference aim was to join developers and advanced users in a
    single place to talk about Debian and work together developing
    parts of the distribution.

    Debian 2.2 (Potato) was released August 15th, 2000 for the Intel
    i386, Motorola 68000 series, alpha, SUN Sparc, PowerPC and ARM
    architectures. This was the first release including PowerPC and
    ARM ports. At the time of release, there were 3900+ binary and
    2600+ source packages maintained by more than 450 Debian
    developers.

    An interesting fact about Debian 2.2 is that it showed how a free
    software effort could lead to a modern operating system despite
    all the issues around it. This was studied thoroughly by a group
    of interested people in an article called Counting potatoes: The
    size of Debian 2.2, by Jesús González Barahona, quoting from this
    article:

    "[...] we use David A. Wheeler's sloccount system to determine
    the number of physical source lines of code (SLOC) of Debian 2.2
    (aka potato). We show that Debian 2.2 includes more than
    55,000,000 physical SLOC (almost twice than Red Hat 7.1, released
    about 8 months later), showing that the Debian development model
    (based on the work of a large group of voluntary developers
    spread around the world) is at least as capable as other
    development methods [...] It is also shown that if Debian had
    been developed using traditional proprietary methods, the COCOMO
    model estimates that its cost would be close to $1.9 billion USD
    to develop Debian 2.2. In addition, we offer both an analysis of
    the programming languages used in the distribution (C amounts for
    about 70%, C++ for about 10%, LISP and Shell are around 5%, with
    many others to follow), and the largest packages (Mozilla, the
    Linux kernel, PM3, XFree86, etc.)"

4.5. The 3.x Releases

    Before woody could even begin to be prepared for release, a
    change to the archive system on ftp-master had to be made.
    Package pools, which enabled special purpose distributions, such
    as the new "Testing" distribution used for the first time to get
    woody ready for release, were activated on ftp-master in mid
    December 2000. A package pool is just a collection of different
    versions of a given package, from which multiple distributions
    (currently experimental, unstable, testing, and stable) can draw
    packages, which are then included in that distribution's Packages
    file.

    At the same time a new distribution testing was introduced.
    Mainly, packages from unstable that are said to be stable moved
    to testing (after a period of a few weeks). This was introduced
    in order to reduce freeze time and give the project the ability
    to prepare a new release at any time.

    In that period, some of the companies that were shipping modified
    versions of Debian closed down. Corel sold its Linux division in
    the first quarter of 2001, Stormix declared bankruptcy on January
    17th 2001, and Progeny ceased development of its distribution on
    October 1st, 2001.

    The freeze for the next release started on July 1st 2001.
    However, it took the project a little more than a year to get to
    the next release, due to problems in boot-floppies, because of
    the introduction of cryptographic software in the main archive
    and due to the changes in the underlying architecture (the
    incoming archive and the security architecture). In that time,
    however, the stable release (Debian 2.2) was revised up to seven
    times, and two Project Leaders were elected: Ben Collins (in
    2001) and Bdale Garbee. Also, work in many areas of Debian
    besides packaging kept growing, including internationalization,
    Debian's web site (over a thousand web pages) was translated into
    over 20 different languages, and installation for the next
    release was ready in 23 languages. Two internal projects: Debian
    Junior (for children) and Debian Med (for medical practice and
    research) started during the woody release time frame providing
    the project with different focuses to make Debian suitable for
    those tasks.

    The work around Debian didn't stop the developers from joining
    the annual DebConf meeting. The second meeting Debconf1 was held
    from the 2nd to the 5th of July together with the Libre Software
    Meeting (LSM) at Bordeaux (France) gathered around forty Debian
    developers. The third conference, Debconf2 took place in Toronto
    (Canada) July 5th 2002 with over eighty participants.

    Debian 3.0 (woody) was released July 19th, 2002 for the Intel
    i386, Motorola 68000 series, alpha, SUN Sparc, PowerPC, ARM, HP
    PA-RISC, IA-64, MIPS, MIPS (DEC) and IBM s/390 architectures.
    This is the first release including HP PA-RISC, IA-64, MIPS, MIPS
    (DEC) and IBM s/390 ports. At the time of release, there were
    around 8500 binary packages maintained by over nine hundred
    Debian developers, becoming the first release to be available on
    DVD media as well as CD-ROMs.

    Before the next release the DebConf annual meeting continued with
    the fourth conference, DebConf3 taking place in Oslo from July
    18th to July 20th 2003 with over one hundred and twenty
    participants, with a DebCamp preceding it, from July 12th to July
    17th. The fifth conference, DebConf4, took place from May 26th to
    June 2nd 2004 in Porto Alegre, Brazil with over one hundred and
    sixty participants from twenty six different countries.

    Debian 3.1 (sarge) was released June 6th, 2005 for the same
    architectures as woody, although an unofficial AMD64 port was
    released at the same time using the project hosting
    infrastructure provided for the distribution and available at
    Alioth (formerly at https://alioth.debian.org). There were around
    15,000 binary packages maintained by more than nine hundred
    Debian developers.

    There were many major changes in the sarge release, mostly due to
    the large time it took to freeze and release the distribution.
    Not only did this release update over 73% of the software shipped
    in the previous version, but it also included much more software
    than previous releases almost doubling in size with 9,000 new
    packages including the OpenOffice suite, the Firefox web browser
    and the Thunderbird e-mail client.

    This release shipped with the 2.4 and 2.6 Linux kernel series,
    XFree86 4.3, GNOME 2.8 and KDE 3.3 and with a brand new
    installer. This new installer replaced the aging boot-floppies
    installer with a modular design with provided for more advanced
    installations (with RAID, XFS and LVM support) including hardware
    detection and making installations easier for novice users of all
    the architectures. It also switched to aptitude as the selected
    tool for package management. But the installation system also
    boasted full internationalization support as the software was
    translated into almost forty languages. The supporting
    documentation: installation manual and release notes, were made
    available with the release in ten and fifteen different languages
    respectively.

    This release included the efforts of the Debian-Edu/Skolelinux,
    Debian-Med and Debian-Accessibility sub-projects which boosted
    the number of educational packages and those with a medical
    affiliation as well as packages designed especially for people
    with disabilities.

    The sixth DebConf, Debconf5 was held in Espoo, Finland, from July
    10th to July 17th, 2005 with over three hundred participants.
    Videos from this conference are available online.

    The seventh DebConf, Debconf6 was held in Oaxtepec, Mexico, from
    May 14th to May 22nd, 2006 with around two hundred participants.
    Videos and pictures from this conference are available online.

4.6. The 4.x Releases

    Debian 4.0 (etch) was released April 8th, 2007 for the same
    number of architectures as in sarge. This included the AMD64 port
    but dropped support for m68k. The m68k port was, however, still
    available in the unstable distribution. There were around 18,200
    binary packages maintained by more than one thousand and thirty
    Debian developers.

4.7. The 5.x Releases

    Debian 5.0 (lenny) was released February 14th, 2009 for one more
    architecture than its predecessor, etch. This included the port
    for newer ARM processors. As with the previous release, support
    for the m68k architecture was still available in unstable. There
    were around 23,000 binary packages (built from over 12,000 source
    packages) maintained by more than one thousand and ten Debian
    developers.

    With the release of Debian lenny, the naming scheme for point
    releases was changed: point releases will use a true micro
    version number, so the first point release of Debian lenny will
    be 5.0.1. In the past point releases were named by an r plus the
    number appended to major and minor number, e.g. 4.0r1.

    The eighth DebConf, Debconf7, was held in Edinburgh, Scotland,
    from June 17th to 23th, 2007 with over four hundred participants.
    Videos and pictures from this conference are available online.

    The ninth DebConf, Debconf8, was held in Mar de Plata, Argentina,
    from August 10th to 16th, 2008 with over two hundred
    participants. Videos and pictures from this conference are
    available online.

    The tenth DebConf, Debconf9, was held in Cáceres, Spain, from
    July 23th to 30th, 2009 with over two hundred participants.
    Videos and pictures from this conference are available online.

    The eleventh DebConf, Debconf10, was held in New York City,
    United States of America, from August 1st to 7th, 2010 with
    DebCamp preceding it from July 25th to 31st. Over 200 people
    including Debian developers, maintainers, users gathered at the
    Columbia Campus to participate in the conference. Videos and
    pictures from this conference are available online.

4.8. The 6.x Releases

    Debian 6.0 (squeeze) was released February 6th, 2011.

    After the project decided, the 29th of July 2009, to adopt
    time-based freezes so that new releases would be published the
    first half of every even year. Squeeze was a one-time exception
    to the two-year policy in order to get into the new time
    schedule.

    This policy was adopted in order to provide better predictability
    of releases for users of the Debian distribution, and also allow
    Debian developers to do better long-term planning. A two-year
    release cycle provided more time for disruptive changes, reducing
    inconveniences caused for users. Having predictable freezes was
    expected also to reduce overall freeze time.

    However, even though the freeze was expected in December 2009,
    the announcement that squeeze had frozen came in August 2010,
    coinciding with the celebration of the 10th annual DebConf
    meeting in New York.

    New features include:

      * Linux Kernel 2.6.32, now completely free and without
        problematic firmware files.

      * libc: eglibc 2.11

      * GNOME 2.30.0 with some pieces of 2.32

      * KDE 4.4.5

      * X.org 7.5

      * Xfce 4.6

      * OpenOffice.org 3.2.1

      * Apache 2.2.16

      * PHP 5.3.3

      * MySQL 5.1.49
   
      * PostgreSQL 8.4.6

      * Samba 3.5.6

      * GCC 4.4

      * Perl 5.10

      * Python 2.6 and 3.1

      * 10,000 new packages, for more than 29,000 binary packages
        built from nearly 15,000 source packages.

      * DKMS, a framework to generate Linux kernel modules whose
        sources do not reside in the Linux kernel source tree.

      * Dependency-based ordering of init scripts using insserv,
        allowing parallel execution to shorten the time needed to
        boot the system.

      * Two new ports, kfreebsd-i386 and kfreebsd-amd64.

    Many packages started using a new source package format based on
    quilt. This new format, called "3.0 (quilt)" for non-native
    packages, separates Debian patches from the distributed source
    code. A new format, "3.0 (native)", was also introduced for
    native packages. New features in these formats include support
    for multiple upstream tarballs, support for bzip2 and lzma
    compressed tarballs and the inclusion of binary files.

    The twelfth DebConf, Debconf11, was held in Banja Luka, Republic
    of Srpska, Bosnia and Herzegovina, from 24 to 30 July 2011, with
    DebCamp preceding it from 17 to 23 July.

    The thirteenth DebConf, Debconf12, was held in Managua,
    Nicaragua, from 8 to 14 July 2012, with DebCamp preceding it from
    1 to 6 July, and a Debian Day on 7 July.

4.9. The 7.x Releases

    Debian 7.0 (wheezy) was released May 4th, 2013. This new version
    of Debian included various interesting features such as multiarch
    support, several specific tools to deploy private clouds, an
    improved installer, and a complete set of multimedia codecs and
    front-ends which removed the need for third-party repositories.

    After the release of Debian wheezy, the naming scheme for point
    releases was changed once again: point releases will be named by
    the minor version number, e.g. 7.1. In the past point releases
    were named by the micro number appended to major and minor
    number, e.g. 6.0.1.

    During the Debian Conference DebConf11, in July 2011, the
    "multiarch support" was introduced. This feature was a release
    goal for this release. Multiarch is a radical rethinking of the
    filesystem hierarchy with respect to library and header paths, to
    make programs and libraries of different hardware architectures
    easily installable in parallel on the very same system. This
    allows users to install packages from multiple architectures on
    the same machine. This is useful in various ways, but the most
    common is installing both 64 and 32-bit software on the same
    machine and having dependencies correctly resolved automatically.
    This feature is described extensively in the Multiarch manual.

    The installation process was greatly improved. The system could
    be installed using software speech, above all by visually
    impaired people who do not use a Braille device. Thanks to the
    combined efforts of a huge number of translators, the
    installation system was available in 73 languages, and more than
    a dozen of them were available for speech synthesis too. In
    addition, for the first time, Debian supported installation and
    booting using UEFI for new 64-bit PCs, although there was no
    support for Secure Boot yet.

    Other new features and updated software packages included:

      * Linux Kernel 3.2

      * kFreeBSD kernel 8.3 and 9.0

      * libc: eglibc 2.13

      * the GNOME 3.4 desktop environment

      * KDE Plasma Workspaces and KDE Applications 4.8.4

      * the Xfce 4.8 desktop environment

      * X.org 7.7

      * LibreOffice 3.5.4 (replacing OpenOffice)

      * Xen Hypervisor 4.1.4

      * Apache 2.2.22

      * Tomcat 6.0.35 and 7.0.28

      * PHP 5.4

      * MySQL 5.5.30

      * PostgreSQL 9.1

      * Samba 3.6.6

      * GCC 4.7 on PCs (4.6 elsewhere)

      * Perl 5.14

      * Python 2.7

      * 12,800 new packages, for more than 37,400 binary packages
        built from nearly 17,500 source packages.

    For more information on the new features introduced in this
    release, see the What's new in Debian 7.0 chapter of Wheezy
    Release Notes.

    The fourteenth DebConf Debconf13, was held in Vaumarcus,
    Switzerland, from 11 to 18 August 2013, with DebCamp preceding it
    from 6 to 10 August, and a Debian Day on 11 August.

    The fifteenth DebConf Debconf14, was held in Portland, United
    States of America, from 23 to 31 August 2014. With 301 attendees
    it was the largest Debconf in the Western hemisphere to date.

4.10. The 8.x Releases

    Debian 8.0 (Jessie) was released April 25th, 2015.

    A major change in this release was the replacement of the init
    system: systemd replaced sysvinit. This new init system featured
    many improvements and faster boot times. Its inclusion, however,
    sparked a lot of debate in the different mailing lists and even
    led to a General Resolution titled init system coupling. which
    was voted by close to half of the developers^[2].

    Other new features and updated software packages included:

      * Apache 2.4.10

      * Asterisk 11.13.1

      * GIMP 2.8.14

      * an updated version of the GNOME desktop environment 3.14

      * GNU Compiler Collection 4.9.2

      * Icedove 31.6.0 (an unbranded version of Mozilla Thunderbird)

      * Iceweasel 31.6.0esr (an unbranded version of Mozilla Firefox)

      * KDE Plasma Workspaces and KDE Applications 4.11.13

      * LibreOffice 4.3.3

      * Linux 3.16.7-ctk9

      * MariaDB 10.0.16 and MySQL 5.5.42
   
      * Nagios 3.5.1

      * OpenJDK 7u75

      * Perl 5.20.2

      * PHP 5.6.7

      * PostgreSQL 9.4.1

      * Python 2.7.9 and 3.4.2

      * Samba 4.1.17

      * Tomcat 7.0.56 and 8.0.14

      * Xen Hypervisor 4.4.1

      * the Xfce 4.10 desktop environment

      * more than 43,000 other ready-to-use software packages, built
        from nearly 20,100 source packages.

    For more information on the new features introduced in this
    release, see the What's new in Debian 8.0 chapter of Jessie
    Release Notes.

    The sixteenth DebConf Debconf15, with DebCamp and the Open
    Weekend, took place in Heidelberg, Germany, from 9 to 22 August
    2015.

    The seventeenth DebConf Debconf16 was held in Cape Town, South
    Africa, from 23 June to 9 July 2016 (preceded by DebCamp and
    DebianDay). It was the first DebConf in Africa.

4.11. The 9.x Releases

    Debian 9.0 (Stretch) was released June 17th, 2017.

    New features and updated software packages included:

      * Apache 2.4.23

      * Bind 9.10

      * Calligra 2.9

      * Emacs 25.1

      * Firefox 50.0

      * GNOME desktop environment 3.22

      * GNU Compiler Collection 6.3

      * GnuPG 2.1

      * KDE Plasma Workspaces and KDE Applications 5.8

      * LibreOffice 5.2.7

      * Linux 4.9

      * MariaDB 10.1

      * OpenJDK 8

      * OpenSSH 7.4p1

      * Perl 5.24

      * PHP 7.0

      * Postfix 3.1

      * PostgreSQL 9.6

      * Python 3.5

      * Samba 4.5.8

      * Xen Hypervisor 4.8.1

      * the Xfce 4.12 desktop environment

      * more than 51,000 other ready-to-use software packages, built
        from nearly 25,000 source packages.

    For more information on the new features introduced in this
    release, see the What's new in Debian 9.0 chapter of Stretch
    Release Notes.

    The eighteenth DebConf Debconf17 took place in Montreal, Canada,
    from 31 July to 12 August 2017, preceded by its DebCamp and the
    DebianDay.

    The nineteenth DebConf Debconf18 - the first DebConf in Asia -
    was held in Hsinchu, Taiwan, from 21 July to 5 August 2018,
    traditionally preceded by the DebCamp and an Open Day for the
    public.

4.12. The 10.x Releases

    Debian 10.0 (Buster) was released July 6th, 2019.

    New features and updated software packages included:

      * Apache 2.4.38

      * Bind 9.11

      * Calligra 3.1

      * Emacs 26.1

      * Firefox 60.7

      * GNOME desktop environment 3.30

      * GNU Compiler Collection 8.3

      * GnuPG 2.2

      * KDE Plasma Workspaces and KDE Applications 5.14

      * LibreOffice 6.1

      * Linux 4.19

      * MariaDB 10.3

      * OpenJDK 11

      * OpenSSH 7.9p1

      * Perl 5.28

      * PHP 7.3

      * Postfix 3.3.2

      * PostgreSQL 11

      * Python 3.7.3

      * Rustc 1.34

      * Samba 4.9

      * the Xfce 4.12 desktop environment

      * more than 57,700 other ready-to-use software packages, built
        from nearly 25,000 source packages.

    For more information on the new features introduced in this
    release, see the What's new in Debian 10.0 chapter of Buster
    Release Notes.

    Right after the release of Buster, the twentieth DebConf
    Debconf19 took place in Curitiba, Brazil, from 14 to 28 July
    2019, together with DebCamp and an Open Day.

    The twenty-first DebConf Debconf20 was held online - due to
    COVID-19 - from August 23rd to 29th, 2020.

4.13. The 11.x Releases

    Debian 11.0 (Bullseye) was released August 14th, 2021.

    New features and updated software packages included:

      * Apache 2.4.48

      * Bind 9.16

      * Calligra 3.2

      * Emacs 27.1

      * Firefox 78

      * GNOME desktop environment 3.38

      * GNU Compiler Collection 10.2

      * GnuPG 2.2.27

      * KDE Plasma Workspaces and KDE Applications 5.20

      * LibreOffice 7.0

      * Linux 5.10

      * MariaDB 10.5

      * OpenJDK 11

      * OpenSSH 8.4p1

      * Perl 5.32

      * PHP 7.4

      * Postfix 3.5

      * PostgreSQL 13

      * Python 3.9.1

      * Rustc 1.48

      * Samba 4.13

      * the Xfce 4.16 desktop environment

      * more than 59,500 other ready-to-use software packages, built
        from more than 25,000 source packages.

    For more information on the new features introduced in this
    release, see the What's new in Debian 11.0 chapter of Bullseye
    Release Notes.

    Right after the release of Bullseye, the twenty-second DebConf
    Debconf21 was held online - due to COVID-19 - from August 24 to
    August 28, 2021. It was preceded by an (online) DebCamp from
    August 15 to August 23, 2021.

    DebConf22, the 23rd annual Debian Conference, took place in
    Prizren, Kosovo from July 17th to 24th, 2022. We've hosted 260
    attendees from 38 different countries participating in 91 event
    talks, discussion sessions, Birds of a Feather (BoF) gatherings,
    workshops, and other activities.

    DebConf23, took place in Kochi, India from September 10th to
    17th, 2023. Over 474 attendees representing 35 countries from
    around the world came together for a combined 89 events made up
    of Talks, Discussions, Birds of a Feather (BoF) gatherings,
    workshops, and other activities.


---------------------------------------------------------------------

    ^[2] In the Debian Project Leader Elections of the previous four
    years the number of voters had been usually around 40% of the
    existing Debian Developers

Chapter 5. Some Important Events

5.1. October 2000: Implementation of Package Pools

    James Troup reported that he has been working on re-implementing
    the archive maintenance tools and switching to package pools.
    From this date, files are stored in a directory named after the
    corresponding source package inside of the pools directory. The
    distribution directories will only contain Packages files that
    contain references to the pool. This simplifies overlapping
    distributions such as testing and unstable. The archive is also
    database-driven using PostgreSQL which also speeds up lookups.

    This concept of managing Debian's archives sort of like a package
    cache was first introduced by Bdale Garbee in this email to the
    debian-devel list in May of 1998.

5.2. November 2002: Fire burnt Debian server

    Around 08:00 CET on November 20th, 2002, the University of Twente
    Network Operations Center (NOC) caught fire. The building burnt
    to the ground. The fire department gave up hope on protecting the
    server area. Among other things the NOC hosted satie.debian.org
    which contained both the security and non-US archive as well as
    the new-maintainer (nm) and quality assurance (qa) databases.
    Debian rebuilt these services on the host klecker, which was
    recently moved from the U.S.A. to the Netherlands.

5.3. November 2003: Several Debian servers hacked

    Starting 17:00 UTC on November 19th, 2003, four of the project's
    main Web servers for bug tracking, mailing lists, security and
    Web searches have been compromised. The services were taken down
    for inspection and fortunately it could be confirmed, that the
    package archive was not affected by this compromise. On November
    25th, all services were recovered and back online.

Chapter 6. Remembering People We Have Lost

6.1. July 2000: Joel Klecker died

    On July 11th, 2000, Joel Klecker, who was also known as Espy,
    passed away at 21 years of age. No one who saw 'Espy' in #
    mklinux, the Debian lists or channels knew that behind this
    nickname was a young man suffering from a form of Duchenne
    muscular dystrophy. Most people only knew him as 'the Debian
    glibc and powerpc guy' and had no idea of the hardships Joel
    fought. Though physically impaired, he shared his great mind with
    others.

    Joel Klecker (also known as Espy) will be missed.

6.2. March 2001: Christopher Rutter died

    On March 1st, 2001, Christopher Matthew Rutter (also known as
    cmr) was killed after he was struck by a car at the age of 19.
    Christopher was a young and well known member of the Debian
    project helping the ARM port. The buildd.debian.org site is
    dedicated to his memory.

    Chris Rutter will be missed.

6.3. March 2001: Fabrizio Polacco died

    On March 28th, 2001, Fabrizio Polacco passed away after a long
    illness. The Debian Project honors his good work and strong
    dedication to Debian and Free Software. The contributions of
    Fabrizio will not be forgotten, and other developers will step
    forward to continue his work.

    Fabrizio Polacco will be missed.

6.4. July 2002: Martin Butterweck died

    On July 21st, 2002, Martin Butterweck (also known as blendi) died
    after battling leukemia. Martin was a young member of the Debian
    project who recently joined the project.

    Martin Butterweck will be missed.

6.5. May 2004: Manuel Estrada Sainz and Andrés García Solier died

    On May 9th Manuel Estrada Sainz (ranty) and Andrés García Solier
    (ErConde) were killed in a tragic car accident while returning
    from the Free Software conference held at Valencia, Spain.

    Manuel Estrada Sainz and Andrés García Solier will be missed.

6.6. July 2005: Jens Schmalzing died

    On July 30th Jens Schmalzing (jensen) died in a tragic accident
    at his workplace in Munich, Germany. He was involved in Debian as
    a maintainer of several packages, as supporter of the PowerPC
    port, as a member of the kernel team, and was instrumental in
    taking the PowerPC kernel package to version 2.6. He also
    maintained the Mac-on-Linux emulator and its kernel modules,
    helped with the installer and with local Munich activities.

    Jens Schmalzing will be missed.

6.7. December 2008: Thiemo Seufer died

    On December 26th Thiemo Seufer (ths) died in a car accident. He
    was the lead maintainer of the MIPS and MIPSEL port and he had
    also contributed at length in the debian-installer long before he
    became a Debian developer in 2004. As a member of the QEMU team
    he wrote most of the MIPS emulation layer.

    Thiemo Seufer will be missed.

6.8. July 2009: Steve Greenland died

    On July 18th Steve Greenland (stevegr) died of cancer. He was the
    maintainer of many core packages (such as cron) since he joined
    Debian in 1999.

    Steve Greenland will be missed.

6.9. August 2010: Frans Pop died

    Frans Pop (fjp) died on August 20th. Frans was involved in Debian
    as a maintainer of several packages, a supporter of the S/390
    port, and one of the most involved members of the Debian
    Installer team. He was a Debian listmaster, editor and release
    manager of the Installation Guide and the release notes, as well
    as a Dutch translator.

    Frans Pop will be missed.

6.10. April 2011: Adrian von Bidder died

    Adrian von Bidder (cmot) died on April 17th. Adrian was one of
    the founding members and secretary of debian.ch, he sparked many
    ideas that made Debian Switzerland be what it is today. Adrian
    also actively maintained software in the Debian package archive,
    and represented the project at numerous events.

    Adrian von Bidder will be missed.

6.11. May 2013: Ray Dassen died

    Ray Dassen (jdassen) died on May 18th. Ray was a Debian Developer
    for incredible 19 years. He joined the project in 1994, and
    continued to be an active contributor until his passing. Ray was
    one of the founding members of the Debian GNOME team, his
    friendliness and willingness to help fostered a spirit of
    collaboration within the GNOME team. He continued his involvement
    within Debian as the maintainer of several packages, most notably
    the Gnumeric spreadsheet.

    Ray Dassen will be missed.

6.12. June 2013: Paul Cupis died

    Paul Cupis died on 17th June 2013, he was 32 years old. He joined
    Debian in 2003. Paul (cupis@debian.org) was active in maintaining
    the doctorj (analyzing Javadoc comments) and other packages in
    Debian.

    Paul Cupis will be missed.

6.13. July 2014: Peter Miller died

    Peter Miller died on July 27th. Peter was a relative newcomer to
    the Debian project, but his contributions to Free and Open Source
    Software go back to the late 1980s. Peter was significant
    contributor to GNU gettext as well as being the main upstream
    author and maintainer of other projects that ship as part of
    Debian, including, but not limited to srecord, aegis and cook.
    Peter was also the author of the paper Recursive Make Considered
    Harmful.

    Peter Miller will be missed.

6.14. February 2015: Clytie Siddall died

    Clytie Siddall died in February 2015. Clytie was a contributor of
    Vietnamese translations to Debian and other projects for many
    years. Within Debian she worked on translations for the
    installer, dpkg, apt and various documentation. She also
    contributed translations within the GNOME community and many
    other projects. Clytie was also a GNOME foundation member between
    2005 and 2007.

    Clytie Siddall will be missed.

6.15. December 2015: Ian Murdock died

    Ian Murdock, the founder of the Debian Project and its community,
    died in December 2015. Ian was introduced to computers early in
    his life, he started actively programming at nine years of age.
    With the idea and the opportunity to make something better, he
    started the Debian Project in August of 1993. At that time, the
    whole concept of a "distribution" of Linux was new. Inspired as
    he said by Linus Torvalds' own sharing of Linux, he released
    Debian with the intention that this distribution should be made
    openly, in the spirit of Linux and GNU. Ian's dream lives on:
    Debian is made up of a strong community that has fostered
    development, growth, and wonder. It remains incredibly active
    with thousands of developers working untold hours to bring the
    world a reliable and secure operating system. Debian has sparked
    the interest, curiosity, and passion of those who want to make
    something better. Then, now, and far into the future.

    The Debian 9 Stretch release was dedicated in his memory.

    Ian Murdock will be missed.

6.16. September 2016: Kristoffer H. Rose died

    Kristoffer H. Rose died on September 17th 2016 after a long
    battle with myelofibrosis. Kristoffer was a Debian contributor
    from the very early days of the project, and the upstream author
    of several packages, such as the LaTeX package Xy-pic and FlexML.
    On his return to the project after several years' absence, many
    of us had the pleasure of meeting Kristoffer during DebConf15 in
    Heidelberg.

    Kristoffer H. Rose will be missed.

6.17. September 2018: Innocent de Marchi died

    Innocent was a math teacher and a free software developer. One of
    his passions was tangram puzzles, which led him to write a
    tangram-like game that he later packaged and maintained in
    Debian. Soon his contributions expanded to other areas, and he
    also worked as a tireless translator into Catalan. Innocent de
    Marchi will be missed.

6.18. March 2019: Lucy Wayland died

    Lucy was a contributor within the Cambridge (UK) Debian
    community, helping to organise the Cambridge Mini-DebConf since
    several years. She was a strong fighter for diversity and
    inclusion, and participated in the creation of the Debian
    Diversity Team, working on increasing the visibility of
    under-represented groups and providing support with respect to
    diversity issues within the community. Lucy Wayland will be
    missed.

6.19. June 2020: Robert Lemmen died

    In June 2020, Robert Lemmen passed away after a serious illness.
    Robert had been regularly attending the Debian Munich meetups
    since the early 00s and helped with local booths. He had been a
    Debian Developer since 2007. Among other contributions, he
    packaged modules for Raku (Perl6 at that time) and helped other
    contributors to get involved in the Raku Team. He also put effort
    into tracking down circular dependencies in Debian. Robert Lemmen
    will be missed.

6.20. June 2020: Karl Ramm died

    Karl Ramm passed away in June 2020, after complications due to
    metastatic colon cancer. He had been a Debian Developer since
    2001 and packaged several components of MIT's Project Athena. He
    was passionate about technology and Debian, and always interested
    in helping others to find and promote their passions. Karl Ramm
    will be missed.

6.21. January 2021: Adam Conrad died

    Adam "infinity" Conrad (formerly adconrad@d.o) passed away 26
    January 2021 at the age of 43 years. Adam Conrad will be missed.

6.22. April 2021: Rogério Theodoro de Brito died

    In April 2021, we lost Rogério Theodoro de Brito due to the
    COVID-19 pandemic. Rogério enjoyed coding small tools and had
    been a Debian contributor for more than 15 years. Among other
    projects, he contributed toward the use of Kurobox/Linkstation
    devices in Debian and maintained the youtube-dl tool. He also
    participated and was "Debian contact" in several upstream
    projects. Rogério Theodoro de Brito will be missed.

6.23. September 2023: Abraham Raji died

    On 13th September 2023 Abraham Raji was involved in a fatal
    accident during a kayaking trip.

    Abraham was a popular and respected Debian Developer as well a
    prominent free software champion in his home state of Kerala,
    India. He was a talented graphic designer and led design and
    branding work for DebConf23 and several other local events in
    recent years. Abraham gave his time selflessly when mentoring new
    contributors to the Debian project, and he was instrumental in
    creating and maintaining the Debian India website.

    The Debian Project honors his good work and strong dedication to
    Debian and Free Software. Abraham’s contributions will not be
    forgotten, and the high standards of his work will continue to
    serve as an inspiration to others.

6.24. December 2023: Gunnar Hjalmarsson died

    Debian Developer Gunnar Hjalmarsson passed away in 2023. Gunnar
    was a consistent and valued contributor to Ubuntu since 2010
    particularly on internationalization efforts and became similarly
    involved in Debian. He was an active maintainer in the Debian
    GNOME and Input Method teams.

    Gunnar Hjalmarsson (1958-10-06 - 2023-12-20, Sweden) will be
    missed.

6.25. July 2024: Peter De Schrijver died

    Debian Developer (since 2004) and Linux kernel hacker Peter "p2"
    De Schrijver passed away in July 2024. Many of us knew Peter as a
    very helpful and dedicated person and we valued his contributions
    to our project and the Linux community. Peter was a regular and
    familiar face in many conferences and meets across the world.
    Peter was highly regarded for his technical expertise in problem
    solving and for his willingness to share that knowledge. When
    asked "what are you working on?", Peter would often take the time
    to explain something you thought was extremely complicated
    understandably, or show you in- person his high technical
    proficiency in action on such tasks as translating a disassembled
    binary into C source code.

    Peter's work, ideals, and memory leave a remarkable legacy and a
    loss that is felt around the world not only in the many
    communities he interacted with but in those he inspired and
    touched as well.

    Peter De Schrijver (1970-09-17, Antwerp - 2024-07-12, Finland)
    will be missed.

6.26. November 2024: Jérémy Bobbio died

    Jérémy "lunar" Bobbio, 41 years old, died on November 8, 2024.
    Lunar was very active as a Debian Developer, worked on the Tor
    project, and was one of the founders of the Reproducible Builds
    movement. They are remembered as a creative, thoughtful, smart
    activist; who made a huge impact on very thriving Free Software
    projects. Jérémy Bobbio will be missed.

6.27. January 2025: Steve Langasek died

    Steve Langasek, 45, of Portland, Oregon, passed away on January
    1, 2025, at Oregon Health and Science University Hospital. Steve
    was one of the Release Managers during the Debian 3.1 "sarge"
    release, in 2005 as well as during the 4.0 "etch" release in
    2007. Steve Langasek (1979-04-27 - 2025-01-01, Portland) will be
    missed.

Chapter 7. What's Next?

    The Debian Project continues to work on the unstable distribution
    (codenamed sid, after the evil and "unstable" kid next door from
    the Toy Story 1 who should never be let out into the world). Sid
    is the permanent name for the unstable distribution and is always
    'Still In Development'. Most new or updated packages are uploaded
    into this distribution.

    The testing release is intended to become the next stable release
    and is currently (as of July 2024) codenamed Trixie.

Appendix A. The Debian Manifesto

    Written by Ian A. Murdock, Revised 01/06/94

A.1. What is Debian Linux?

    Debian Linux is a brand-new kind of Linux distribution. Rather
    than being developed by one isolated individual or group, as
    other distributions of Linux have been developed in the past,
    Debian is being developed openly in the spirit of Linux and GNU.
    The primary purpose of the Debian project is to finally create a
    distribution that lives up to the Linux name. Debian is being
    carefully and conscientiously put together and will be maintained
    and supported with similar care.

    It is also an attempt to create a non-commercial distribution
    that will be able to effectively compete in the commercial
    market. It will eventually be distributed by The Free Software
    Foundation on CD-ROM, and The Debian Linux Association will offer
    the distribution on floppy disk and tape along with printed
    manuals, technical support and other end-user essentials. All of
    the above will be available at little more than cost, and the
    excess will be put toward further development of free software
    for all users. Such distribution is essential to the success of
    the Linux operating system in the commercial market, and it must
    be done by organizations in a position to successfully advance
    and advocate free software without the pressure of profits or
    returns.

A.2. Why is Debian being constructed?

    Distributions are essential to the future of Linux. Essentially,
    they eliminate the need for the user to locate, download,
    compile, install and integrate a fairly large number of essential
    tools to assemble a working Linux system. Instead, the burden of
    system construction is placed on the distribution creator, whose
    work can be shared with thousands of other users. Almost all
    users of Linux will get their first taste of it through a
    distribution, and most users will continue to use a distribution
    for the sake of convenience even after they are familiar with the
    operating system. Thus, distributions play a very important role
    indeed.

    Despite their obvious importance, distributions have attracted
    little attention from developers. There is a simple reason for
    this: they are neither easy nor glamorous to construct and
    require a great deal of ongoing effort from the creator to keep
    the distribution bug-free and up-to-date. It is one thing to put
    together a system from scratch; it is quite another to ensure
    that the system is easy for others to install, is installable and
    usable under a wide variety of hardware configurations, contains
    software that others will find useful, and is updated when the
    components themselves are improved.

    Many distributions have started out as fairly good systems, but
    as time passes attention to maintaining the distribution becomes
    a secondary concern. A case-in-point is the Softlanding Linux
    System (better known as SLS). It is quite possibly the most
    bug-ridden and badly maintained Linux distribution available;
    unfortunately, it is also quite possibly the most popular. It is,
    without question, the distribution that attracts the most
    attention from the many commercial "distributors" of Linux that
    have surfaced to capitalize on the growing popularity of the
    operating system.

    This is a bad combination indeed, as most people who obtain Linux
    from these "distributors" receive a bug-ridden and badly
    maintained Linux distribution. As if this wasn't bad enough,
    these "distributors" have a disturbing tendency to misleadingly
    advertise non-functional or extremely unstable "features" of
    their product. Combine this with the fact that the buyers will,
    of course, expect the product to live up to its advertisement and
    the fact that many may believe it to be a commercial operating
    system (there is also a tendency not to mention that Linux is
    free nor that it is distributed under the GNU General Public
    License). To top it all off, these "distributors" are actually
    making enough money from their effort to justify buying larger
    advertisements in more magazines; it is the classic example of
    unacceptable behavior being rewarded by those who simply do not
    know any better. Clearly something needs to be done to remedy the
    situation.

A.3. How will Debian attempt to put an end to these problems?

    The Debian design process is open to ensure that the system is of
    the highest quality and that it reflects the needs of the user
    community. By involving others with a wide range of abilities and
    backgrounds, Debian is able to be developed in a modular fashion.
    Its components are of high quality because those with expertise
    in a certain area are given the opportunity to construct or
    maintain the individual components of Debian involving that area.
    Involving others also ensures that valuable suggestions for
    improvement can be incorporated into the distribution during its
    development; thus, a distribution is created based on the needs
    and wants of the users rather than the needs and wants of the
    constructor. It is very difficult for one individual or small
    group to anticipate these needs and wants in advance without
    direct input from others.

    Debian Linux will also be distributed on physical media by the
    Free Software Foundation and the Debian Linux Association. This
    provides Debian to users without access to the Internet or FTP
    and additionally makes products and services such as printed
    manuals and technical support available to all users of the
    system. In this way, Debian may be used by many more individuals
    and organizations than is otherwise possible, the focus will be
    on providing a first-class product and not on profits or returns,
    and the margin from the products and services provided may be
    used to improve the software itself for all users whether they
    paid to obtain it or not.

    The Free Software Foundation plays an extremely important role in
    the future of Debian. By the simple fact that they will be
    distributing it, a message is sent to the world that Linux is not
    a commercial product and that it never should be, but that this
    does not mean that Linux will never be able to compete
    commercially. For those of you who disagree, I challenge you to
    rationalize the success of GNU Emacs and GCC, which are not
    commercial software but which have had quite an impact on the
    commercial market regardless of that fact.

    The time has come to concentrate on the future of Linux rather
    than on the destructive goal of enriching oneself at the expense
    of the entire Linux community and its future. The development and
    distribution of Debian may not be the answer to the problems that
    I have outlined in the Manifesto, but I hope that it will at
    least attract enough attention to these problems to allow them to
    be solved.

