Post-release testing showed up a variety of bugs in the images produced for the 6.0.1 point release, one for each of the three types:
The script used to build the netinst and businesscard CDs was misconfigured, and was using the testing (Wheezy) version of Debian Installer instead of the correct Squeeze version.
During the original 6.0.0 Squeeze release, we encountered problems in making some of the CD images fit; once the Squeeze release notes were added, the alternate KDE installation CD for several of the architectures grew too large. A number of last-minute tweaks were made on that release day to try to fix this, and the problem was mitigated. Unfortunately, (as is often the case with quick hacks in these situations) these tweaks did not work well in the next release and caused unforeseen problems. Various of the 6.0.1 images that should have been sized to fill a DVD were instead limited to approximately 700 MiB.
In between the Lenny and Squeeze releases, a fair amount of the code in the debian-cd package was refactored for clarity and to aid in maintenance. This also included deleting some older helper scripts that seemed to be redundant. Unfortunately, that conclusion was incorrect; two scripts were removed that were necessary for the correct operation of the "update-cd" script that generates the update CD and DVD images. Due to this oversight, on the day of the point release those images were created wrongly. They contained package and source data, but the metadata files Packages.gz and Sources.gz were missing.
In each of the cases listed above, the failure case has been analysed and is understood. Fixes for all of the problems have been developed, and replacement images are being produced and tested. Following our normal naming scheme, the new images are versioned 6.0.1a to denote the bugfix rebuild.
We offer apologies for any incovenience caused by these errors. The very next task for the Debian CD team will be to integrate more extensive automated QA for our CD images, in the hope that we will significantly reduce the likelihood of bugs like these in the future.
Steve McIntyre, on behalf of the Debian CD team. 23rd March 2011.