James Troup reported
that he has been working on re-implementing the archive maintenance tools and
switching to package pools. From this date, files are stored in a directory
named after the corresponding source package inside of the
pools
directory. The distribution directories will only
contain Packages files that contain references to the pool. This simplifies
overlapping distributions such as testing and unstable. The archive is also
database-driven using PostgreSQL which also speeds up lookups.
This concept of managing Debian's archives sort of like a package cache was first introduced by Bdale Garbee in this email to the debian-devel list in May of 1998.
Starting 17:00 UTC on November 19th, 2003, four of the project's main Web servers for bug tracking, mailing lists, security and Web searches have been compromised. The services were taken down for inspection and fortunately it could be confirmed, that the package archive was not affected by this compromise. On November 25th, all services were recovered and back online.