With the next version of Debian frozen for release in September, eight of its 12 architectures risk exclusion. That's because, according to Debian Maintainer Luk Claes, in some cases “The architecture qualification pages on wiki.debian.org are still missing a LOT of information.”

In a href=”http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2008/07/msg00005.html” target=”new”>post announcing his plans for a September release of Lenny, Claes noted, “Of the current 12 architectures, eight are still at risk of being dropped unless their issues can be solved. Check the [ARCH:QUAL] pages for more information as to the current issues.”

Claes adds, “In some cases, these arches are not being considered because we may not have enough information in the wiki pages to make an informed judgement.”

On the upside for embedded folks, the release looks likely to include a new “armel” architecture branch, featuring binary packages built with ARM EABI support. And, there's likely to be a Feroceon/Orion installer. PowerPC and SPARC32 at least have Lenny Recertification pages. Little and big endian MIPS do not appear to have been certified even against Etch, the current release. 68K is in the same (lagging) boat. Other architectures… well?

Like Luk says, information is needed. To check on the status of your favorite, have a look at the relevant ReleaseCertification page listed on the various architecture pages here.

For more general information about Lenny, and Claes's September release plans, refer to more complete coverage on our sister site, DesktopLinux.com, here.

Debian has long been a favorite distribution of developers assembling filesystems for devices (though the Debian kernels and installers tend to be pretty conservative and out-of-date).

 
This article was originally published on LinuxDevices.com and has been donated to the open source community by QuinStreet Inc. Please visit LinuxToday.com for up-to-date news and articles about Linux and open source.