The Debian Release Team is entering the hot phase of the upcoming Debian 7.0 "Wheezy" release. The list of Release Critical Bugs has been shortened to less than a hundred bugs, and for approximately half of those, the developers have already decided to ignore the problems in question or to drop the packages if patches will not be submitted soon.

However, the developers will only accept small patches that fix the problem in question and do not touch other parts of the system as they are trying to move ahead with the release. A release candidate for the new Debian Installer has been available for over a month.

Taking the current progress into account, it is possible that Debian Wheezy could be released over the Easter holidays. For this to be the case, at least bug 703419 needs to be fixed, which entails finishing the release notes for Wheezy.

(fab)