=== D-I STRING FREEZE: Thu 12 Okt, 00:00 UTC - Sun 22 Okt, 00:00 UTC ===
Hi folks,
This mail really should have gone out at least two and probably three
weeks earlier. Blame goes to the discussions on d-{private,vote,wherever}
which resulted in a serious drop in my motivation in recent weeks and in
me dragging my heels on preparing the release.
My apologies for letting you all down.
GENERAL STATUS
==============
The most important work planned for RC1 has been done and the installer in
general works well, although some finishing touches and testing are still
planned in the run up to Release Candidate 1 of the installer.
I don't have a hard planned release date yet, but it will probably be
first week of November. Detailed planning and updates will be sent to
d-boot and d-release lists.
General status and preparations for Etch RC1 can be found on [1].
As it looks now RC1 will be released with kernel 2.6.17, unless 2.6.18 is
ready to migrate to testing in time for us to make the switch before the
release. If not, we plan to switch to 2.6.18 ASAP after RC1 and release
RC2 ASAP after 2.6.18 does migrate to testing.
How can you help?
-----------------
If you have some time, please help us by testing the installer. We need
testing especially for the non-mainstream architectures and new features
recently introduced in the installer (e.g. encrypted partitioning).
Especially welcome is also specific testing by e.g. maintainers of
packages/functionality used in the installer: RAID/LVM support, PCMCIA,
filesystems (JFS, XFS, ...), bootloaders, etc.
Please check if the bits *you* care about are supported well!
Watch out for calls for testing on d-d-a!
GRAPHICAL INSTALLER
===================
The graphical installer now, for the first time, uses udebs built from
official GTK library packages (2.8.x), which means we will be able to
drop the various unofficial packages we have been using up to Beta 3.
Thanks to Dave Beckett, Loïc Minier and Josselin Mouette for helping us
get this far!
The GNOME maintainers have decided to stay with 2.14 and GTK 2.8.x for
Etch. This means that g-i will also stay with the current 2.8.x libs, so
until the release we need to focus on that and leave work on 2.10.x for
post-Etch.
There is one RC issue that will need to be resolved before RC1: #390683.
TRANSLATIONS
============
As announced at the top of this mail there will be a string freeze from
Okt 12 to 22, which means there will be no changes in English strings for
level1, unless it is absolutely unavoidable.
Please try to update your translations (for level 1) in that period
(preferably to 100%). There will be a full upload of all installer
components with updated translations immediately after the freeze and
these will be included in the release.
There have been a few important changes in strings this weekend and there
may be a few more in the next few days.
Please also reserve time for testing the installer in you translation
after the release. The RC2 release is very likely the last chance to fix
any issues!
After discussion with Christian Perrier (the god of Debian/D-I i18n), we
have, with regret, decided to drop support in the installer for a few
translations that are very incomplete and have seen no activity from
translators for a very long time. The affected languages are: Belarusian
and Xhosa, and probably also Tamil and Georgian.
Besides the incompleteness of the translations, an important factor in
this decision is that the installer requires a huge amount of memory
currently and a large percentage of that goes to translations. Disabling
some languages gives us some needed breathing space.
A few other languages are still in danger of being dropped before Etch.
Christian and I will keep you updated on d-i18n.
On the positive side: we've gained support for Marathi.
INSTALLATION GUIDE
==================
The installation guide will need at least some important updates and
hopefully there will be a little time and energy left over for some
restructuring, though probably nothing really major.
Cheers,
FJP
[1] http://wiki.debian.org/DebianInstaller/EtchRC1Prep
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