Debian Weekly News - February 21st, 2001
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Debian Weekly News
http://www.debian.org/News/weekly/2001/6/
Debian Weekly News - February 21st, 2001
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Welcome to Debian Weekly News, a newsletter for the Debian community.
It's time to think about freezes, and releases, and all that nasty
stuff again. Anthony Towns posted [1]plans for the upcoming freeze. He
plans to freeze testing in three stages. First the base system will be
frozen and tested. Next the boot-floppies, standard packages, and
tasks will go through a freeze and test cycle of their own, and
finally everything else will be frozen and tested. This will allow
updates to less important packages while the core of Debian is already
frozen, so fewer packages will be out of date in the final release. Aj
included a "theoretical (and overly optimistic) timeline", spanning
some 5 months (and probably longer), with the first test cycle
beginning April-ish. A [2]bug squashing party will be held on IRC this
weekend to begin fixing release critical bugs.
The boot-floppies team needs help. Adam Di Carlo [3]wrote in, asking
for help on what may be the final revision of the boot floppies -- for
woody -- before the upcoming debian-installer effort replaces them.
According to Adam, "a lot of the 'talent' have been sucked into
debian-installer. I have pretty much no one helping me right now with
boot-floppies maintenance." He included a list of tasks that need
doing to get a usable set of boot floppies for woody, and concluded,
"Please help me out. Otherwise, god knows when we'll be able to
release woody!"
Many of the Debian autobuilders are severely overloaded. Debian has
[4]one machine that does m68k autobuilds, and the poor thing has to
try to keep up with the constant churn of unstable. It is [5]400+
packages behind now, and has not updated any packages uploaded to
non-US since [6]January 10th. Arm is even further behind, and sparc
is way behind as well. The situation is worse with respect to
non-free: most autobuilders [7]do not build non-free packages at all,
leaving maintainers of non-free with the difficult chore of manually
trying to build it [8]on all architectures if they want updates to
get into testing. M68k machines are not going to get any faster as the
years go by, so we need to find more m68k machines to use as
autobuilders lest the port slip dangerously behind.
The nomination period for DPL is over, and the candidates have begin
posting platforms. [9]Ben Collins and [10]Branden Robinson have
posted platforms so far. Ben listed some specific issues he wants to
deal with if if elected, including "allowing new maintainers with less
privileges", QA, and a more pro-active stance on security. Branden, in
turn, listed some issues including a more formalized delegation
process, keeping track of unmaintained packages and MIA developers,
and ensuring Debian is well represented at real-life events.
Unstable lived up to its name again this week, despite (or maybe
because of?) the impending freeze. The latest perl reorganization went
well all and all, but there have been some reports of apt wanting to
remove everything rather than do that upgrade. And speaking of apt,
apt 0.5 just made it into unstable! This major new revision of apt
includes features like "apt-get build-dep", to download a source
package, satisfy build dependencies, and build it. And it supports the
pinning feature, to allow for commands like "apt-get install
mozilla/unstable" (which installs unstable's version of mozilla onto a
testing or stable system). Shoop also entered Debian this week, but
nobody really noticed.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
References
1. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce-0102/msg00014.html
2. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce-0102/msg00018.html
3. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-0102/msg00824.html
4. http://db.debian.org/machines.cgi?host=kullervo
5. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-0102/msg01156.html
6. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-0102/msg01156.html
7. http://lists.debian.org/debian-mentors-0102/msg00224.html
8. http://lists.debian.org/debian-mentors-0102/msg00259.html
9. http://lists.debian.org/debian-vote-0102/msg00017.html
10. http://lists.debian.org/debian-vote-0102/msg00018.html
--
see shy jo
Reply to: