Backports.org is now an official Debian service. Here the announcement:
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The Debian Project http://www.debian.org/
Backports service becoming official press@debian.org
September 5th, 2010 http://www.debian.org/News/2010/20100995
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Backports service becoming official
The Debian Project is proud to announce that the backports service,
previously available at www.backports.org [1] is now an official Debian
service available at backports.debian.org [2].
1: www.backports.org
2: backports.debian.org
Backports are packages from the testing distribution recompiled for the
current stable (or even oldstable) release to provide users of the stable
distribution with new versions of certain packages, like the Linux
kernel, the Iceweasel browser or the OpenOffice.org suite, without
sacrificing the overall stability of the system.
The archive currently has 528 packages backported for the Lenny
distribution. As the infrastructure to accept packages for the upcoming
Squeeze release is already in place, this allows Debian Installer images
to configure the backports repository by default without generating
errors on user systems. The service for Squeeze will be enabled at a
later date, after the release.
Because of limitations in the Debian Bug Tracking System, any bugs
relevant to backported packages still have to be reported to the
debian-backports [3] list, which have now also been moved to
lists.debian.org [4].
3: http://lists.debian.org/debian-backports/
4: http://lists.debian.org
Informations on how to use the backports service are available at the new
backports website [5]. Users of the old backports service should change
their sources.list to point to:
deb http://backports.debian.org/debian-backports lenny-backports main contrib non-free
(or one of its mirrors). Please also note, that with the integration into
Debian's infrastructure the GPG key used to sign the backports repository
has been changed to Debian's official FTP-master key.
5: http://backports.debian.org/Instructions/
About www.backports.org
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The backports service at www.backports.org was orginially started by
Debian Developer Norbert Tretkowski with much support from team(ix). It
was later continued and improved by Debian Developers Alexander Wirt
(organisation) and Jörg Jaspert (technical support) to host over 500
backported packages for various architectures.
We would like to thank team(ix) for providing a good home for this
service for all these years.
6: http://www.backports.org/
7: http://www.teamix.net/
About Debian
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The Debian Project was founded in 1993 by Ian Murdock to be a truly free,
community project. Since then the project has grown to be one of the
largest and most influential open source projects. Over three thousand
volunteers from all over the world work together to create and maintain
Debian software. Translated into over 30 languages, and supporting a huge
range of computer types, Debian calls itself the "universal operating
system".
