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beta 2 plans



Happy New Year, everyone!

I have not managed to download the ISO yet (phone troubles), but I am
fairly sure that the New Years Eve ISO images will fix nearly all the
outstanding showstoppers for i386. There are one or two more important
but not essential things pending[1], and they will make it into the Jan
1st or 2nd images. So I'm fairly confident that d-i will be in a
releaseable state for i386 by this weekend.

Of course that leaves the ports. Both powerpc and ia64 have made progress
in the past couple of days:
	- powerpc daily builds are back
	- powerpc isos being created again
	- powerpc kernel issues partially straightened out
	- ia64 kernel issues being resolved
	- ia64 debian-installer package built for debian archive (I think)
	- ia64 install report; only a few showstoppers
.. But it's not looking very likely that they will be releaseable this
weekend. (But please prove me wrong!) I have still not seen any install
reports for the current powerpc images. Or mips, or any other architecture
that're a possibility for beta 2. Though I do appreciate the increased
activity I've seen recently from serveral porters on powerpc, mips,
sparc, arm, and ia64.

So my new plan is, as soon as i386 is releasable, to work to migrate the
current set of debian-installer udebs and images to testing. AJ has
agreed to do this without the usual testing delay stuff, all in one
lump. After that is complete, we will make a "beta2" branch in the CVS
tree, and open HEAD to development. However, we will *not* upload
developmental udebs to unstable, because that would make it hard to get
any fixes into testing -- so anyone who wants to do work in HEAD will
have to set up their own udeb repository or upload to experimental or
something. Uploads to unstable will be reserved for changes to fix
porting problems. Once a port is ready for release, it will be copied to
testing the same as i386 was.

This plan depends on us not being branched for too long before the
actual beta release, so I need each architecture's porters to get
together, discuss amoung yourselves what needs to be done and who will
be available to do it when, and work out amoung yourselves a date that
you plan to have the port ready by. I'd suggest something around January
10-14th, and will not be happy with dates much later than that. If it
will take longer, your port is probably not beta 2 material. I'll
collect the dates, and reconcile them, and come up with a cutoff date,
after which we will release beta 2, even if it turns out all ports miss
the date (but I sincerely hope this will not happen). 

** Please get these dates to me by or before January 5th. **

After we release, the beta 2 stuff in testing will stay there unchanged,
until we release a beta 3, or a 1.0, or whatever we decide to call it. Of
course I am not privy to AJ's private release plans for sarge, so it's
always possible that the beta 2 stuff in testing will become the *final*
sarge release. That's scary, but it's also half of the point in my
continued drive to get us to make concrete releases. The other half, of
course, is that d-i continues to need much broader testing by users, and
users need something more concrete than a daily build.

-- 
see shy jo

[1] Including getting all the translations in, and getting a new
    i386 busybox in to support 32 mb ram installs.

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