Hi all,
(CCing Robert, since I feel this is important to the work he has done).
After producing a lot of hot air [0] recently, I've decided to send
this email.
gNewSense 3 will be rebased from the current Debian stable, to Debian
testing, as soon as it is frozen by the Debian release managers.
Members of our community [1] have provided a huge amount of work
towards gNewSense, but based on Debian stable.
I have decided that the number (and variety) of backports has caused a
number of issues for package maintenance, and this outweighs the delta
we worry about when dealing with Debian.
The next Debian release is still in 'development mode', so (as a distro)
it is quite open to accepting patches. Now is the time for us to file
bugs and submit patches that we feel affect a gNS based on squeeze
(Debian testing), and to try and get them fixed.
I (personally) feel a responsibility to make gNS 3 the best release yet,
and a notable improvement over gNS 2.x[2]. I can't honestly say I feel
either of these goals would be met by basing on the current Debian
stable (as we do atm) with many and varied backports.