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<chapt id="nexttime">Changes expected in the next major release of Debian

<p>With each new release, the Debian project tries to focus on a set of topics.
These are known as "Release Goals" and they are all described in <url
id="https://wiki.debian.org/ReleaseGoals/">. Please note that the following
sections might not be fully up-to-date, please refer to the Wiki for more
information and the up-to-date status of these goals.
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<sect id="hardening">Hardening the system

<p>It is a goal for the Debian project to ensure that any system installed
is hardened and secure against attacks. There are several ways to achieve
this, which include:

 <list>

  <item>Improve programs' security by compiling them with <url
  id="https://wiki.debian.org/ReleaseGoals/SecurityHardeningBuildFlags"
  name="Security Hardening Build Flags"> in order to enable various protections
  against known security issues,

  <item>Improve the default system configuration to make it less vulnerable to
  attacks (both local or remote),

  <item>Enable security features delivered by new versions of the kernel.

 </list>

<p>All of these are done in an ongoing basis. For the first item, a set of security hardening
build flags that try to prevent known attacks such as stack smashing,
predictable locations of values in memory, etc. is used. The target is to cover at least
all packages that are part of the basic installation as well as packages that
had to be updated through a Security Advisory since 2006. As of this writing,
around 400 packages have been modified since this effort was first started. All the issues
are <url id="https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/pkgreport.cgi?tag=goal-hardening;users=hardening-discuss@lists.alioth.debian.org" name="tracked in the BTS">.


<sect id="i18n">Extended support for non-English users

<p>Debian already has very good support for non-English users, see
<ref id="nonenglish">.

<p>We hope to find people who will provide support for even more languages,
and translate programs and documents. Many programs and Debian-specific
documents already support internationalization, so we
need message catalogs translators. However, still some programs remain to be
properly internationalized.

<p>The GNU Translation Project <url id="ftp://ftp.gnu.org/pub/gnu/ABOUT-NLS">
works on internationalizing the GNU programs and different projects,
such as the Desktop environments GNOME or KDE have their own translation
teams. The goal of Debian is not to replace or to repeat the work done by
these projects, indeed, Debian benefits from the work done by translators in
these projects. However, there are still many programs which are not
in the scope of those projects and which are translated within Debian.

<p>Previous Debian releases have focused in topics such as:

 <list>
  <item>I18n support in all debconf-using packages: Packages using the Debian
configuration management must allow for translation of all messages displayed
to the user during package configuration.
  <item>I18n support for package descriptions: Update package management
frontends to use the translated descriptions of packages.
  <item>UTF-8 debian/changelog and debian/control.  This way, e.g. names of
people from asian countries can get typeset the right way in changelogs.
  <item>I18n support in the Debian Installer including full support for
some languages that require the use of the graphical interface.
 </list>


<sect id="di">Improvements in the Debian Installer

<p>Lots of work has been done on the Debian Installer, resulting in
major improvements.  We'll mention just two of them here.

<p>Starting the installer from Microsoft Windows: It is now possible to start
the installer directly from Microsoft Windows without the need to change BIOS
settings. Upon insertion of a CD-ROM, DVD-ROM or USB stick, an autorun program
will be started, offering a step-by-step process to start the Debian Installer.

<sect id="morearches">More architectures

<p>Complete Debian system on other architectures. Notice that even though some
architectures are dropped for a given release, there still might be a way to
install and upgrade using the latest <tt>sid</tt>.

<sect id="morekernels">More kernels

<p>In addition to Debian GNU/Hurd, Debian is being ported also to BSD kernels,
namely to <url id="http://www.debian.org/ports/kfreebsd-gnu/" name="FreeBSD">.
This port runs on both AMD64 ("kfreebsd-amd64") and traditional Intel
("kfreebsd-i386").

