Re: Plan B for kfreebsd

[Steven Chamberlain <steven@pyro.eu.org>]

Peter Palfrader wrote:
> On Tue, 11 Nov 2014, Samuel Thibault wrote:
> > We are still stuck in the "not released arch => no DSA machine => not
> > released arch" loop.
> 
> Except that it's not a loop.  DSA has indicated time and time again that
> if an arch qualifies for a release in all other aspects, we'd be running
> buildds and porterboxes close to the release.

Until Christoph quoted your brilliant suggestion on IRC, I did think
there were one or more loops here with no obvious way out, for us or
many future ports.

At least, the release team's decision seemed far-reaching, since:

  0.   stable RM says 'no' to a port

  1.1. if there's not a 'stable' release, the buildds can't be DSA
  1.2. without DSA buildds, there can be no security builds either
       (and vice-versa)
  1.3. packages built for sid, on non-DSA buildds are not official?
       so would need to rebootstrap itself

  2.1. testing goes away too
  2.2. users/developers are left with only sid, which is obviously
       more broken;  development gets harder, users leave
  2.3. port becomes less appealing for maintainers to support,
       stop trying to building their packages on it

  3.1. if there's no testing or stable, FTP team might not see much
       reason to distribute it;  it moves to debian-ports.org and, I
       suppose never comes back
  3.2. mirrors no longer carry it, most QA tools and supporting
       infrastructure can no longer support it

  4.   next release qualification, the port seems in pretty bad shape
       due to all of the above probably receives a 'no' again

Anyway, I'm really hopeful now.  weasel suggested a 'jessie-kfreebsd'
suite could still be supported by FTP team.  (Actually, could that be
named something more generic like jessie-ports?  So that another arch
can try something similar?  Or would it be confused too much with
debian-ports.org?)

Porters would try to maintain it like a stable release.  Perhaps able
to do make improvements that release team policy might not have allowed;
like backporting something that particularly benefits that arch.
Practically it would be an 'official Debian port', and we'd have all the
usual things like install media.

If it turns out to be in fact stable, hopefully it would be acceptable
to DSA.  The remaining obstacles go away.  It sounds sustainable, and
seems like a model for other ports to follow.

Regards,
-- 
Steven Chamberlain
steven@pyro.eu.org