Re: testing and no release schedule

[Adrian Bunk <bunk@fs.tum.de>]

On Thu, Mar 25, 2004 at 11:46:46PM -0800, Adam McKenna wrote:
> On Fri, Mar 26, 2004 at 04:10:29PM +0900, Miles Bader wrote:
> > 
> > Debian releases on what is it, 11 archs?  Most of them are never tested
> > by upstream authors, so if there's a problem, guess where it's going to
> > show up?
> 
> How about we just stop making excuses?  If dead architectures are holding up
> the release process, then drop them, or make them secondary platforms.  m68k
> wouldn't be any worse off today if we had released an i386 sarge six months
> ago.

Which of the architectures Debian 3.0 released with do you consider to 
be dead?

Several problems show up then and when and they are distributed between
all architectures, but there's not one architecture that is guilty for
holding things seriously up.

E.g. m68k seems to be overally in a good shape. It might be annoying 
that the autobuilders often have problems to keep up with the big stream 
of packages in unstable, but that's nothing that would seriously hold 
up a release (and as soon as a freeze happens such problems will 
immediately disappear since during a freeze the number of changed 
packages significantely decreases).

A real problem are RC issues in essential packages like e.g. glibc.

Let's check for which architectures there are architecture-specific RC 
bugs open against glibc today [1]:
- i386
- alpha
- sparc


And there are also benefits of supporting many architectures, an 
example:

hppa in Debian 3.0 uses gcc 3.0. Therefore, the hppa maintainers had to 
report all compile errors with with g++ 3 as non-RC bugs.

Some bugs were not fixed before Debian 3.0 was released, and this was 
only a hppa problem. But the big amount of reported and mostly fixed 
issued with g++ 3 made the g++ 3.2 transition for all architectures much 
easier.


> --Adam

cu
Adrian

[1] I don't claim this is representative, but it shows that problems
    not only exist on the architectures you might have thought of.

-- 

       "Is there not promise of rain?" Ling Tan asked suddenly out
        of the darkness. There had been need of rain for many days.
       "Only a promise," Lao Er said.
                                       Pearl S. Buck - Dragon Seed