Recall that our timeline for the next beta release had us releasing an etch installer with 2.6.12 kernel as default, rescue mode, new languages, and whatever other goodies were ready, by the end of this month. We're actually almost on that schedule, except the 2.6.12 kernel was only uploaded a few days ago, may not even be on the mirrors yet due to ftp-master downtime, and doesn't seem likely to reach testing by the end of the month at all. Actually, the kernel team seems to already need to do a few more revisions of this before it's ready to go into testing, and I'm not sure if getting it into testing is a priority for them at all. So d-i seems likely to be stuck booting 2.6.11 (on i386) and installing 2.6.8 for a while. There's also the issue that d-i builds have been broken on several architectures (currently broken on amd64, arm, hppa, mips, mipsel, and s390), so it's likely some of these architectures won't currently build, or work, in etch. Of course this has a simple solution: such arches can be unsupported in the beta release. Finally, secure apt lurks in unstable, waiting for the c++ transition to finish before it gets into testing and breaks installation from CDs. A patch for this is out there in an apt arch repo and I think it will get into apt eventually, but we need to factor this into our planning, along with the probability of other big changes/breakage in Debian. Anyway, we may still have time to make a beta release before the end of the month, if ftp-master comes back up as scheduled and the buildds are not too loaded. I think it would probably be pushing things and would not have enough new features for users to want to use it though. Or we can put it off for another month and hope that secure apt (or whatever) doesn't become a big problem for us in the meantime. If we delay by another month, that would be 3 months since the release of sarge, and I don't want to see any gaps longer than that between d-i releases, because we'll really be under a lot of pressure for a new release by then. Also, don't let any talk of releases slow down your own d-i development. Development is more important that releases right now, and it would be great if some more features/fixes get done and can be put into the eventual beta release. -- see shy jo
Attachment:
signature.asc
Description: Digital signature