Etch is a "Done Deal"
 

http://lists.debian.org/debian-annou.../msg00002.html

The repositories are a bit of a mess right now ... I'd wait a few days to be sure things are organized.

My local repo seems to work fine.
I just updated my "stable" home server without having any problems :)

Hopefully it will not be quite as bad as last time. Sarge to Etch will be painless but if you are running Sid or sticking with testing (Lenny) then be wary of the newer packages trickling in from experimental and unstable respectively. apt-listbugs will come in handy.

So it is actually Official Official.. Etch is as of Today the new stable? Is so that is So cool, becasue I just installed etch yesterday on AMD64. Never seen my computer run so fast.. LOL. If this is indeed the offical annoucement then I guess I can upgrade my servers. Can anyone confirm that this is indeed official.. Looked at debian site and sarge is still listed as current stable.

After Posting my message I took a look at site again and it is now offical.... Site is updated and Etch is the new Stable... Yay... Now to upgrade my servers.. Wish me luck.. Hope nothing breaks.. Don't know if I will do it remotely... Most likely will travel to servers to do upgrade in case something bad happens.. We'll see

First off, major congrats to the Debian team for getting yet another major release out.

That is the only "safe" way to do things. Just as a test, I did a series of upgrades on servers that are unimportant to see how things went.

The first test case was a webserver. The sources.list file only had stable, stable-src, and security.The kernel is the default sarge 2.6.8.2 kernel. Apt-get update followed by upgrade only did like 10 packages, and left 186 or so on a list of packages that would not be upgraded. After that, I did a dist-upgrade, and that grabbed all of the packages that it had not upgraded previously. It didn't grab a new kernel. The upgrade included new versions of ssh, which is how I was on the machine at the time. It all went flawlessly. It grabbed everything, and went off without a problem.

I didn't do any of our "main" servers like email or DNS. Those we are waiting to do until we can be in front of the machine, in case something should go wrong. It is one of those things, it is very likely nothing goes wrong, but if something does, you're there to fix it.

Peace,
JimBass

So is testing supposed to get nasty for a while now? I don't have any upgrades today, but I'm guessing that the updates will start coming in alot faster than they have been?

yes, time to comment out experimental :)

So far even unstable has only seen 4 new packages for my machines. It will get choppy in the coming days I would expect. Testing isn't likely to get too crazy, as it still has unstable lead-blocking for it. There will be some bugs that get through, but it isn't likely to be a big problem.

Peace,
JimBass

Wonderful news:-) I've been waiting for this day.:D
How many days do you think we should wait to do a netinstall of 4.0, rickh?

Another thing to consider before you procede will be the extra strain on the Debian servers. a dist-upgrade or a netinstall might take alot longer than usual, depending on your chosen server.

True. Well-said. I always do a clean install using the netinstall iso. Yes, the Debian servers are probably taking a real hit today.
I'll wait a day or two.

All I can say Is I am glad I did my install yesterday. Right before the release... I don't have to worry about overload. Installed AMD64 version and loving it. Now will do my servers end of next week.

Sounds good:-) I'm downloading the netinstall iso now. I'll do the install in several days when things calm down a bit.:D

Congratulations to Debian for another stable release.