Happy news! According to the release team, the next version of Debian has been frozen. This means that a release, indefinitely postponed for what seems like an eternity, is now imminent.
Among other things, the new release (Debian 3.1, codename “sarge”) now has a security infrastructure, making it possible for daring souls to upgrade to it and not leave security behind. I’ve been really wanting to do some things with software not available in the current release (Debian 3.0, “woody”), so off I went and upgraded. The victim: the main Web and mail server for my domain.
Since you’re reading this, you know it went well.
The upgrade was really smooth; only two serious bugs and one minor bug showed up. Of the serious bugs, one was already known and mentioned in the announcement (the perl bug). The other: I decided to upgrade the Web server to Apache 2. Since this is a WordPress blog, and since WordPress is written in something called PHP, I needed the PHP module for Apache 2 (version 4). This module, unfortunately, doesn’t install properly without some manual tweaking. The bug has been filed.
The last bug: imagemagick was held back to the woody version. This wasn’t a big deal, and was easy to fix (“apt-get install imagemagick”), but might be worth looking into to make sure the upgrade goes well for others.