Debian has entered "Transition freeze".
Transition freeze ... means no new library transitions or package transitions that involve a large
number of packages.
Full freeze: Feb 5 2017.
As always, Debian 9 "Stretch" will be released "when it's ready".
Release Team Announcement
Release dates
(Score: 2) by requerdanos on Thursday November 17 2016, @07:05PM
I don't know whether I am being naive or not, but it is my thinking that things like Debian/KFreeBSD and Debian/Hurd are super-valuable because they don't/can't use systemd, but use pretty much the rest of Debian. This makes me think that Debian will be separable from systemd for at least as long as those projects last.
(Score: 3, Informative) by urza9814 on Thursday November 17 2016, @08:00PM
They've already tried to drop Debian/KFreeBSD:
https://soylentnews.org/article.pl?sid=14/10/07/2313245 [soylentnews.org]
And Debian/Hurd is not actually released yet, so that would be even easier to drop. It's just an experimental development branch right now.
Mainline Debian devs probably aren't going to do much to keep those projects alive...it's more about the maintainers of those projects being dedicated enough to keep them going *despite* what the rest of Debian is doing.
(Score: 3, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 17 2016, @09:35PM
And this is my surprised face:
(Score: 2) by NCommander on Friday November 18 2016, @10:52PM
Debian/Hurd is unlikely to ever reach release-criteria anytime soon. I was involved with that project in my college days (and I learned a lot about kernel engineering from it), but the fact of the matter is that GNU mach is very slow because its using Mach messaging to do microkernel stuff, and that messaging is exceptionally slow (300-400ms per context switch last I checked). There are also large scale performance issues dealing with blocksize and such in many of the translators combined with the system being relatively sluggish overall.
Debian/kFreeBSD on the other hand has a lot of nifty things going for it, but because they switched from BSD libc to glibc, and tried to make it as much like other debian ports, it breaks a lot of things that assumes its stock BSD. For instance, jails for a long time were broken because the userland couldn't handle glibc. I'd be willing to use it if it was closer to BSD with a Debian userland, not a bastardized Linux distro with a BSD kernel.
Still always moving