Hello lists,It is now at least a year after the weekly live images have not been generated and distributed from official Debian hardware [1].
However, in the mean time a lot has happened, and a lot has not (yet) happened.
First: what has happened:* Live-images are generated on a regular schedule by Jenkins [2] (daily for Sid, weekly for Bookworm, monthly for Bullseye) * These images are based on the tool 'live-build', as was the case until Jessie
* The live-build tool has seen maintenance and works well * The images are verified to be reproducible [3] * Only after the verification passes, the images are pushed onto openQA [4]* The images are verified to boot on BIOS, non-secure UEFI and secure-boot UEFI for both CD-ROM and USB devices (a 3x2 matrix test) * All regular desktop environments (GNOME, KDE, XFCE, LXQT, LXDE, Mate, Cinnamon) (for amd64) are verified to be bootable and to have a working Firefox and CUPS PDF-printing * For some desktop environments the default applications are tested whether they start or not * All boot menu entries are checked, to see whether they are able to proceed to the first stable screen
* The d-i installer is run and the installed hard disk image is booted * Overall: The live images are in good shape Thankfully, I had lots of help for the bottlenecks that I encountered. Second: what has not happened (yet):* The images are not generated and distributed by official Debian hardware (by adjusting the existing scripts in the live-setup repo) * The boot menu in the live-build based images has not been adjusted to look more like the live-wrapper based images (e.g. the localisation submenu with the lots of languages)
* The Calamares installer is not tested automatically by openQA * The firmware repository is not included* The content of the live images is not totally reviewed (but there are also some rough edges on the live-wrapper based images) * The d-i installer cannot be run totally off-line yet (which the live-wrapper image is capable of)
I'm currently quite happy with the state of the automated testing, which I see as a major precondition before publishing the images.
Third: what needs to happen (soon):* Given that the release of Bookworm is getting closer and closer, the next step will be to start generating the images officially again (since the current images are not on servers that are designed for such high traffic) * More maintainers/testers are needed, supporting so many variants needs to be done by a team * The news that Debian will have/does have live images again needs to be spread
With kind regards, Roland Clobus [1] https://lists.debian.org/debian-cd/2021/10/msg00008.html [2] https://jenkins.debian.net/view/live/[3] https://hamburg-2022.mini.debconf.org/talks/11-reproducible-builds-as-applied-to-non-compiler-output/
[4] https://openqa.debian.net/group_overview/14
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