Those not following Debian development closely might have missed the Debian release team opening the doors for a GNOME 2.8 upload to unstable. Today, the first libraries have started hitting incoming and are building in the buildd network. The end goal is, of course, to ship sarge with GNOME 2.8.

We hope to have the whole thing uploaded by chunks in the next few days. While seb128 is confident about everything going well, I can't help being quite nervous about it, given how some past experiences went. We're doing uploads with extreme care, though. Everything should be alright.

Due to some concerns expressed by Kamion and vorlon, we'll have to leave out a few new GNOME 2.8 modules from the default install. Most noticeably, evolution won't be installed by default when someone does a desktop install. Also, gnome-volume-manager won't replace magicdev as the default automounting device for now, as sarge's official kernel is 2.4, and gnome-volume-manager depends on Linux 2.6 features. All of this is because the space in the first Sarge CD is a bit too tight for us to add all the new GNOME modules. It'll be easy to install the missing bits though.

We'll post more stuff as it happens. :)