Re: Bits (Nybbles?) from the Vancouver release team meeting
On Sun, Mar 13, 2005 at 11:36:47PM -0800, Steve Langasek wrote:
> For the specific case of sparc, it's worth noting that this architecture
> was tied for last place (with arm) in terms of getting the ABI-changing
> security updates for the kernel; it took over 2 months to get all
> kernel-image packages updated for both 2.4 and 2.6 (which is a fairly
> realistic scenario, since woody also shipped with both 2.2 and 2.4),
> which is just way too unresponsive. The call for sparc/arm kernel folks
> in the last release update was intended to address this; correct me if
> I'm wrong, but to my knowledge, no one else has stepped forward to help
> the kernel team manage the sparc kernels.
Notice that post-sarge, we will have one kernel-package only which will build
for all arches, like the ubuntu guys do, and that this problem with kernel
security updates may go away for all arches.
BTW, how much of the human intervention needed for buildd signing plays in the
delays you see, and did you discuss the possibiliity of a fully autobuilder
setup, like ubuntu does and i advocated years ago ?
> Well, sparc is not in any danger of being dropped from SCC. :) As I
> said, none of the current sarge candidate architectures are.
But there will be no stable scc release, if i understand the plane well ? Is
this really what you wanted or did i misunderstood ? What would be the problem
on adding scc stable release for later point releases ? We did that already in
the past if i remembed well.
> > In general I would like to say that supporting a lot of architectures was
> > an important difference between Debian and other distributions. I know the
> > drawbacks of this but I just do not want to hide my opinion that I do not
> > like the idea of reducing the number of supported architectures that
> > drastical.
> > IMHO the effect would be that people will start forking Debian for porting
> > issues and we will loose the power of those porters while they will spend
> > time for things they would not have to do else.
>
> I certainly agree that portability is one of Debian's selling points,
> and I also have a "pet" architecture that doesn't appear to make the
> cut for etch; but I don't think it's a coincidence that the release
> cycle got longer when we doubled the arch count between potato and
> woody, and I *know* it's not a coincidence that we have a long release
> cycle for sarge while trying to wrangle those same 11 architectures.
He, and most of the DPL candidate just posted that they didn't believe the
release delay will drop if we drop arches. I also remember that ia64 was one
of the most problematic to autobuild the ocaml packages in august or so, and
it was worse off than m68k, mips or arm if i remember well.
Friendly,
Sven Luther
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