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Re: Maintenance and compatibility



John Smith wrote:
> 	-d-i etch is (rightly) a continuation of d-i sarge, but the
> udeb's used in the installation are not kept seperatedly on the mirrors.
> d-i-sarge uses d-i-etch udebs.

That's incorrect. Like any other package in debian, a udeb is kept at
different versions in each branch of debian. For example:

base-installer |     1.13.4 |        stable | source, alpha, arm, hppa, i386, ia64, m68k, mips, mipsel, powerpc, s390, sparc
base-installer |       1.39 |       testing | source, alpha, arm, hppa, i386, ia64, m68k, mips, mipsel, powerpc, s390, sparc
base-installer |       1.39 |      unstable | alpha, hurd-i386, m68k
base-installer |       1.40 |      unstable | source, arm, hppa, i386, ia64, mips, mipsel, powerpc, s390, sparc

> 	-there isn't a process to do maintenance (debug errors) on sarge
> only udebs.

That's incorrect. If a serious bug is found in any package in stable, it
can be corrected in the next point release. d-i udebs are just packages.

For example, we've been talking with the security people about issuing an
update for the topmost errata item listed at
http://www.us.debian.org/releases/sarge/debian-installer/

With that said, like any other package in stable, most bug fixes will not
warrant an update to stable; it's generally more important that stable be
unchanging and bugfixes have a way of leading to other problems. Most of
the errata items would be good candiates to be fixed, if someone wants
to do the work.

> 	Keep in mind there never was an official d-i-sarge. The one
> downloadable from March '05 is still marked as rc3.

That's incorrect and is as absurd as claiming that Debian never released
an official kernel or libc with sarge because we didn't rebuild the
whole archive that day. That's not how things work.

Just because we called it "rc3" (which, by the way, stands for "release
candidate") when it was released and, there happens to be a symlink to
that effect in the archive, does not make it not be the official sarge
installer, built with the procedures we established to build the
official sarge installer, and tested with the quality control measures
we set down for the sarge installer. Part of that quality control
involved testing it or a month or more, and it had no bugs serious
enough to warrant another round of updates to the boot images show up in
the remaining months before the release.

(We actually did slip in a few fixes to individual udebs after rc3,
including a crucial fix made just days before sarge's release, but
nobody noticed them.)

> I use the one from JoeyH's images dated 6-6, the release date of sarge.

Which is some random snaphot of when post sarge development was just
beginning again, that was built on a machine that had been running
something newer than sarge for several months, using build parameters
that did not target the images at installing stable (iirc those images
will pull d-i udebs from testing like any other d-i daily build), at a
period when my maintainence of it was very low due to being marooned at
the beach, but whatever.

> 	D-i-etch isn't backwards compatible with sarge (ie. not able to
> install sarge, see 344371).

Correct. If anyone feels like implementing this, we will accept it, just
as we did when the debian-edu developers made sure that the sarge
installer would install woody. But in the meantime maintaining
compatability with sarge would be a lot of work and a severe limit on
the numerous large improvements we have been making since the sarge
release.

-- 
see shy jo

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