GNU/Linux Debian 5.0, "Lenny" has missed its originally proposed September release because of too many critical bugs. The developers have now issued a rallying call to Debian maintainers and users to encourage them to work on the next major release of Debian, with the aim of getting 5.0 out before the end of 2008.

Debian users who want to help are encouraged to try the Debian 5.0 beta releases, or upgrade their existing Debian installation.

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But:

Today, an article at heise online claimed, that Lenny is supposed to ship this year, quoting Alexander’s blog entry. While I can’t find a single word in Alexander’s article claiming that we’ll release this year, I’m pretty sorry that just after we failed the first deadline which was obviously too “optimistic”, we get another one which is too short.

Two month’s ago I created a pretty simple estimation regarding Lenny’s release by looking at the rc-bugfix-rate of the last two releases and applying them to the current number of rc-bugs. As a result it looked more likely that we release Lenny in June 2009 than in September 2008.

Lenny’s release date