Re: Bits (Nybbles?) from the Vancouver release team meeting
(Please don't cc me. I'm on-list. Thanks.)
On Mon, Mar 14, 2005 at 04:06:39PM +0000, Alastair McKinstry wrote:
> The question is: how do you release a SCC arch, if at all?
>
> Its unlikely that producing an s390 (for example) release for etch is simply
> a matter of building the released etch on
> s390. It will probably take patches to the released packages
> for s390 to work. Is the s390 release etch+patches ?
> There would be version skew;
There would be version skew, but porters should continue to submit mainline
patches as they always have. I don't see any reason at all why they shouldn't.
It might be harder to actually get them in to packages in a timely manner, but
we'll have to see how that all falls out.
I feel like it's an unfortunate tradeoff, but in all honesty I'd rather release
etch than support a lot of arch's (most of which I've personally never seen in
real life) and never release.
> will Security releases be available?
Explicitly no, unless the porters themselves handle them. I'd imagine that
getting a member of the port team on the security team would help a great deal
there. Of course, that would require people coming out from their little corner
of Debian and helping with core pieces, which would help the project in a huge
way.
> Immediately post a release, there is likely to be a flood of
> RC-creating changes, as transitions that were postponed for the release are
> committed; indeed this is the recommended time to do them, in order to get as
> much time for stabilisation as possible, However under the proposal, any SCC
> architecture build comes from unstable;
Not necessarily. I imagine it such that the porters set up their own pull from
unstable, the same way amd64 does now. They can set up testing themselves
(remember, dak is in the archive now) so they can run their own testing in
parallel to the mainline one.
> so, if s390 doesn't build a working release
> when FCC releases, then back to the bottom of the hill as ahuge pile of new
> RC bugs arrives; it sounds highly unlikely that
> the porters could get s390 unstable into a fit shape to release.
I don't see why not. If the testing approach doesn't work, then there's the
snapshot approach, which has worked well for every single Debian-derived distro
out there.
> I think the coupling between FCC and SCC architecture releases needs to be thought
> through, or at least explained, better.
I'll agree there. Particularly with respect to bugs submitted by porters.
> As it is, if I was an SCC arch maintainer, trying to remain in sync with FCC
> changes sounds impossible under this scheme;
I disagree. I think the tools are all there to do it. There's no magic to
running Debian, it's just a lot of manpower and lot of scripts.
> it will drive the SCC archs away from debian so that they
> have some time to themselves to stabilise.
Possibly, but I hope not.
- David Nusinow
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