Re: Bits from the Release Team (Jessie freeze info)

["Jeremiah C. Foster" <jeremiah@jeremiahfoster.com>]

Hello,

On Sun, Oct 13, 2013 at 05:01:31PM +0200, Niels Thykier wrote:

[snip freeze policy]
 
> Results of porter roll-call
> ===========================
> 
> Summary table:
> Arch           || DDs || NMs/DMs || Other || Total
> - ---------------++-----++---------++-------++------
> armel          ||  5  ||       0 ||     2 ||    7
> armhf          ||  6  ||       1 ||     2 ||    9
> hurd-i386      ||  5  ||       0 ||     3 ||    8
> ia64           || *0* ||       0 ||     3 ||    3
> kfreebsd-amd64 ||  5  ||       0 ||     2 ||    6
> kfreebsd-i386  ||  5  ||       0 ||     2 ||    6
> mips           ||  2  ||       0 ||     1 ||    3
> mipsel         ||  2  ||       0 ||     1 ||    3
> powerpc[1]     || (1) ||       0 ||     2 ||   2.5?
> s390x          ||  1  ||       0 ||     1 ||    2
> sparc          ||  1  ||       0 ||     0 ||    1
> 
> [1] The (1) and .5 is from a "I am not primarily a porter
> [...]"-remark, so I wasn't sure how to count it.
> 
> Based on the number of porters, we are considering changing the
> current requirements of "5 DDs" to better reflect the reality of the
> situation.  We will follow up in a future bits on the changes.
> 
> That said, we would like to encourage porters behind all ports to
> ensure that the toolchain is up to date and working.  We are aware of
> at least gcc on mips having its test suite disabled[GCC].  Other ports
> may suffer from similar issues and we hope to have those resolved
> sooner rather than later.  We are currently waiting for the gcc
> maintainers to compile a list of such issues.

So I can extrapolate from this that ensuring that the toolchain is up
to date and working is a key activity of a porter. If my assumption is
correct, is there a complete definition of the "toolchain" as we see
it in Debian that a porter might reasonably be expected to use to do
thier porting?

In addition, I wonder if there is a way to report the status of the
toolchain and what sort of expectations are there around "up to date"?
Is it expected to build Debian toolchain nightly and run a specific
test suite? Is the expectation that one uses pbuilder and builds a set
of packages? Perhaps this is outlined on the wiki somewhere and if not
perhaps it ought to be?

Regards,

Jeremiah