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Re: M68K boot floppies / CDs



Richard Braakman <dark@xs4all.nl> writes:

> The problem at this point (with respect to bug#53683) is that any
> change to slink requires an update to its changelog, and the release
> of 2.1r5.  I mentally filed it under "stuff to do for the next slink".
> (And I fervently hope that I won't be the one to have to worry about it
> then, because the situation still isn't clear to me.)
> 
> So, what now?

Right, lets imagine this was the i386 floppies, and hence the i386 CDs
we were talking about.

I don't think the release would have happened in the first place, until
it was fixed, but that's mostly due to the fact that there are more
people to spot the problem.

If it had been released with broken floppies, there would be no
question of not fixing it immediately.

It strikes me that this is at least partly due to the fact that we
release all architectures at once, which almost inevitably means that
the non-i386 architectures get less testing time, which is then made
worse by the fact that there are fewer testers.

We now have a bug in the m68k archive that breaks CD production for
the stable release.  This presents us with the following choices:

  1) we fix it without changing the _r4

  2) we fix it and go to _r5 for m68k only

  3) we fix it and move to _r5 for everything

  4) I fix it on the UK mirror, and the ``official'' CDs are produced from 
     something other than the official stable archive.

  5) We forget about it, and fail to produce CDs, like we did last time
     for both m68k & sparc.

I favour 1), or possibly 2)

3) seems like overkill.

4) seems to undermine the whole concept of releases

5) is pathetic.  It's really demoralising to everyone involved.  I
   certainly get fed up with problems that I'm prevented from fixing
   because of some idea that we cannot change a stable release, when
   that release only qualifies as stable on i386.  I don't even use
   these other architectures (well except from sparc occasionally) so
   I can only imagine what the actual developers feel about it.

In conclusion, I think we should probably allow for point releases of
stable to be made independently on different architectures, and we
should make one now for m68k.

Cheers, Phil.
-- 
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|)|  Philip Hands [+44 (0)118 9545656]    http://www.hands.com/
|-|  Philip Hands Computing Ltd.      http://www.uk.debian.org/
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