Re: release status
OOOps... I accidentally hit "send" when I meant to hit "save"... Here's the complete message as I intended it to be!
Rick
Joey Hess wrote:
>
> At this point the only delay is waiting for the autobuilders, which are
> overloaded from all the other uploads surrounding the sarge release, to
> catch up and build the d-i images. In the past 24 hours, we've gotten
> builds for hppa, ia64, s390, and sparc, plus a manual build for alpha.
> That leaves arm, m68k (building), mips, mipsel, and powerpc. d-i is far
> back in the queue for most of these arches[1] and is even slipping
> further behind on some as more high-urgency package uploads happen.
>
> Since it's looking like it could easily take days for some of these
> builds to catch up, we may need to do manual builds on some of these
> architectures. It would be nice if we could get all the builds done
> before the next dinstall run. If you do a manual build, please take careto make it in an up-to-date and clean sid chroot.
>
> Other than that, we seem to be on track for a release. I'm not aware of
> any showstopper issues, and the current errata list is quite small. Once
> the initrd builds get in and the CDs are built with them, we will have
> one final day for last minute testing before the release. The test
> checklist in installer/doc/checklist is still missing many entries and
> the more complete it is the better I'd feel about calling this release
> rc1 instead of beta5.
>
Over the last couple of weeks, I've submitted three (what I consider to be) serious bug report for d-i on OldWorld PowerPC machines, along with several more that are more in the line of annoyances.
Any one of these three bugs will render debian-installer unusable for anyone with anything but a "plain vanilla" hardware or networking environment who doesn't have help from a competent System Administrator, or have such skills personally. Since I'm the only one on this list who cares two figs about OldWorld PowerPC hardware, and I have UNIX SysAdmin experience going back 25 years (including some pretty unusual hardware!), I guess it's not a show stopper... Still, there *might* be some folks out there in the "real world" (TM), who will be disappointed that they can't figure out how to install the new Debian release on their particular old Macintosh hardware. You never know!
For reference, here are the bug numbers and a short description of each:
Bug#261460: Non-DHCP network config step of d-i is broken
If you choose to manually configure the network (don't use DHCP) the installer keeps coming back to the "configure network" step. And if you force it to move forward, then after the reboot, the network interface is not configured. This seems to be unique to OldWorld PowerPC hardware (I've tried it on two different types of OldWorld machines and it breaks identically on both of them. However, it works on a couple of NewWorld machines I tried it on. Go figure!) Also, accepting the default of DNSserver==gateway seems to make it work OK. Verrry strange!
Bug#262201: PowerMac (OldWorld) - no driver for onboard SCSI
The 2.6.7 kernel version of d-i for PowerPC does not recognize Apple's old "mesh" onboard SCSI controller. Seeing as how lots of OldWorld machines have no other way than SCSI of attaching disks or CD-ROM drives, this renders them ineligible for installation using the 2.6.7 kernel. It works OK with the 2.4.25 kernel.
Bug#262865: With two network interfaces after reboot uses the wrong one
On a machine with two Network interface cards, only one of which is to be used (e.g. my situation with an onboard 10BaseT and a PCI 100BaseT but I only want to use the faster interface, and ignore the slower) after the reboot, the wrong interface is configured.
Enjoy!
Rick
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