The start of the jessie freeze is quickly approaching, so now is a good time to ensure that packages you rely on will the part of the upcoming release. Thanks to automated removals, the number of release critical bugs has been kept low, but this was achieved by removing many packages from jessie: 841 packages from unstable are not part of jessie, and won’t be part of the release if things don’t change.

It is actually simple to check if you have packages installed locally that are part of those 841 packages:

apt-get install how-can-i-help (available in backports if you don’t use testing or unstable) how-can-i-help --old Look at packages listed under Packages removed from Debian ‘testing’ and Packages going to be removed from Debian ‘testing’

Then, please fix all the bugs :-) Seriously, not all RC bugs are hard to fix. A good starting point to understand why a package is not part of jessie is tracker.d.o.

On my laptop, the two packages that are not part of jessie are the geeqie image viewer (which looks likely to be fixed in time), and josm, the OpenStreetMap editor, due to three RC bugs. It seems much harder to fix… If you fix it in time for jessie, I’ll offer you a $drink!