Niels Thykier published a status update on the upcoming Debian 8 release

The Jessie freeze is now entering its 4th month. Thanks to many of you,
the release have made good process.

At this point, an April release is /a possibility/ - *however*, it
implies that we all roll up our sleeves and squash those remaining bugs.
I will follow up with a dd-list of packages with RC bugs affecting
unstable and testing to debian-devel shortly.

Known blockers
==============

The RC bug list (according to UDD):

* 55 RC bugs open, affecting key packages in sid AND jessie[1]

- Want to help the release? Help us fix the remaining issues by
triaging those bugs and uploading NMU's with targeted fixes. We
will start tagging some of these bugs jessie-ignore. That means we
will still accept fixes for them (if they are not invasive), but
we will /not/ delay the release for them.

* 17 RC bugs affecting non-key packages. We will remove these
packages from jessie if these bugs are not fixed. If you want to
keep them, now is the time to upload an NMU.

* The release-notes still need some improvements. In particular, a
recovery section for systemd is needed.

- It could most likely also do with a "best practise" and a "do
this before rebooting after the systemd migration" section (among
others).

- If you want to help with this, please follow up to #773386.


Requests for Help
=================

* The Debian GRUB team requested help with the Grub2 RC bugs. Please
consider helping with triaging one or more of:

- #756253 Upgrade from 2.02~beta2-10 to 2.02~beta2-11 left grub [...]
- #778810 grub-efi-amd64-bin: boot/bootx86.efi problems
- #689266 grub-pc: graphics mode sends VGA signal out of range [...]
- #741464 grub-pc-bin: freezes after "terminal_input at_keyboard"
- #777191 grub-efi-amd64 on Debian Jessie cannot boot zfs native ...]
- #778810 grub-efi-amd64-bin: boot/bootx86.efi problems
- #735932 [grub2-common] Computer does not boot

News
====

* Part of our buildd infrastructure need to be upgraded to Jessie
prior to the release. Here, DSA and the wanna-build admins have
migrated servers from about 5 out of 10 architectures. The rest
will hopefully follow soon.

* We have had numerous issues with upgrades due to trigger cycles.
Unfortunately, we had to request a revert of the trigger cycle
checks in dpkg for Jessie and the trigger cycles are now handled as
they were in Wheezy (i.e. silently ignored).

* There have a bit of progress on existing "jessie-is-blocker" bugs.

- #759530, we suspect the problem being corrupted aux-caches and
ldconfig simply not doing any validation of the cache before
using it. Aurelien Jarno is currently reviewing the proposed
patch and plans to discuss it with upstream.

- #779048, we need a upgrade path from libjpeg-progs to
libjpeg-turbo-progs for Jessie. Most likely, it is just a
question of adding a versioned Breaks in libjpeg62-turbo on
libjpeg-progs, some upgrade testing and a dupload.

* We were made aware of a upgrade issue due to the old dependency
cycle between perl and perl-modules. The maintainers and the perl
team have already patched the affected packages and the last of
them have already migrated to testing.

* Cyril Brulebois suggested that the debian-installer RC2 release is
steady approaching.

Kudos
=====

* A big thanks to Ansgar Burchardt for backporting patches from the
debian-specific buildd version of sbuild. This allowed us to start
the upgrade of the buildd infrastructure to Jessie. Also many
thanks to the people involved on the buildd and DSA side their fast
and dedicated work on migrating the hosts so far.

* Thanks to the security team for reviewing some of the current
security bugs and proposing removals, severity adjustments etc.

* Thanks to the Perl Team for their efficient resolution of the perl
dependency cycle.

Thanks,
Niels, on behalf of the Debian Release Team.

[1]
https://udd.debian.org/bugs/?release=jessie_and_sid&merged=ign&keypackages=only&fnewerval=7&flastmodval=7&rc=1&chints=1&ctags=1&cdeferred=1&crttags=1&sortby=id&sorto=asc&format=html#results

[2]
https://udd.debian.org/bugs/?release=jessie_and_sid&merged=ign&keypackages=ign&fnewerval=7&flastmodval=7&rc=1&chints=1&ctags=1&cdeferred=1&crttags=1&sortby=id&sorto=asc&format=html#results