I've been trying for the last two weeks to get into Debian and get a couple good installs under my belt. I love their packaging system and dedication to GPL and community, so I really want this to be my distro of choice... The problem is, their packages.debian.org system was down for the last little while. I tried it today from their http:// stuff and it seems to be back up, but... does anyone know what the scoop is? Their news reports a break in that happened in November, strange that it would still affect them...

I guess my question is this: is the debian project still chugging along real strong, or what? I would hate to put all my eggs into this basket if the basket is going to possibly stagnate. The fact that they had a major chunk of their website down for so long doesn't make me feel too confident...

Anywho, I guess it's two questions in one here, so any answers or opinions would be great.

you are aware they were badly hacked via a flaw in the 2.4.18 kernel and hence the outage? The packages site access has been down but apt was only disabled for a week or so.