Re: why is alpha a release candidate?
On Wed, Jan 17, 2007 at 09:21:07AM -0800, Thomas Bushnell BSG wrote:
> So the release criteria require buildd redundancy. And yet, half the
> release candidate archs still don't have it. It gets marked in yellow
> on http://release.debian.org/etch_arch_qualify.html.
Yes, it gets marked in yellow because this requirement has in practice been
waived as a hard requirement for release qualification, replaced by the
softer principle of "if you don't have buildd redundancy and the buildd goes
down and this begins to negatively affect the release process, we reserve
the right to drop your arch from the release".
So far, I don't believe that this particular outage has substantially
hindered the release. Although the buildd has been down for about 10 days
now, it's still above the "panic" lines on both
<http://buildd.debian.org/stats/graph2-quarter-big.png> and
<http://buildd.debian.org/stats/graph-quarter-big.png>, and has caused only
moderate delays for release-critical updates.
Of course, I have a conflict of interest here as an alpha porter, so
ultimately I'll defer to Andi if he thinks it's become a problem; but in
general we're unlikely to cut a port from the release at this late stage
without some pretty serious, long-term problems.
> Well, the one-and-only alpha buildd has been down for apparently ten
> days and does not respond to ping, and I don't recall seeing anything
> from the alpha team on debian-release or debian-devel. Please correct
> me if this is inaccurate.
The release team was apprised of the buildd's status even before it went
offline.
> It seems to me that, in a freeze, we should be ruthless about such a
> situation.
In practice, the volume of release-critical bugfixes during a freeze is so
small that even an outage of this length doesn't have a major impact on the
release. After 10 days, alpha is blocking a little more than a dozen RC
bugfixes -- which is less than either the kernel (which holds up d-i RC2) or
iceweasel.
The point of the arch requirements is to facilitate a release, not to
penalize architectures.
--
Steve Langasek Give me a lever long enough and a Free OS
Debian Developer to set it on, and I can move the world.
vorlon@debian.org http://www.debian.org/
Reply to: