Following up on its decision to adopt the policy of timed release freezes beginning with the next release of Debian GNU/Linux, the Debian Release Team has now published their list of release goals for the upcoming release of Debian GNU/Linux 6.0, code-named "Squeeze".

In the light of these goals and also in consideration of the Debian community's feedback to the release team's initial announcement during the keynote of this year's DebConf in Caceres, Spain, the Release Team has additionally decided to revisit its decision on December 2009 as the proposed freeze date. A new timeline will be announced by the Debian Release Team in early September.

Luk Claes, Debian Release Manager, underlines the team's commitment to quality saying "In Debian we always strive to achieve the greatest quality in our releases. The ambitious goals that we have set for ourselves will help to secure this quality in the upcoming release."

The Debian Release Team - in cooperation with the Debian Infrastructure Team - plans to include the following goals in the upcoming release:

* Multi-arch support, which will for instance improve the installation of 32 bit packages on 64 bit machines
* kFreeBSD support, introducing the first non-linux architecture into Debian
* Improved boot performance using dash as the new default shell, and a dependency-based boot system that will both clean up the boot process and help performance through parallel processing
* A further enhanced Quality Assurance process resulting in higher quality packages. This includes:
- Clean installation, upgrade and removal of all packages
- Automatic rejection of packages failing basic quality checks
- Double compilation support
* Preparation for new package formats to help streamline future development and to introduce improved compression algorithms
* Removal of obsolete libraries for improved security
* Full ipv6 support
* Large File Support
* Automatic creation of debug packages for the entire archive, a Google Summer of Code Project pending integration into the infrastructure
* Move of packages' long descriptions into a separate "translated package list", which will facilitate their translation and also provide a smaller footprint for embedded systems thanks to smaller Packages files.
* Better integration of debtags, a system to tag packages with multiple attributes for easier package selection
* Discard and rebuild of binary packages uploaded by maintainers, leaving only packages build in a controlled environment

The Debian Project looks forward to working with its many contributors, upstream projects and the worldwide community of Free Software developers in preparing the next high-quality release of the Debian GNU/Linux distribution.