Re: sarge?

[Colin Watson <cjwatson@debian.org>]

On Sun, May 02, 2004 at 08:38:15AM -0400, Carl Fink wrote:
> On Sun, May 02, 2004 at 11:49:28AM +0100, Colin Watson wrote:
> > Aside from that, I'm afraid you would have been necessarily ignored
> > until now. Without a working installer, there is absolutely no point in
> > releasing. This has thoroughly hamstrung any attempts at a time-based
> > release cycle until now.
> 
> There was a working installer in Woody (clunky, but working.)  Given a known
> release schedule, it wouldn't have been repaced in Sarge until a new,
> working installer was actually ready.

This is a common response to my point above, but have you checked to see
if the woody installer will actually install sarge, or be ready for
newer kernels so that we can support installing on newer hardware (which
for many people is half the point of a new stable release)? I'm pretty
sure you'd find this isn't true. We had a choice between a non-working
installer and, er, a non-working installer.

It took quite a bit of effort (several months and a complete cessation
of work on the new debian-installer) to whip the potato installation
system into shape for woody. Sadly, we have *not* historically been in a
position where we can just drop in the installer from the previous
release and expect it to work, and by the end of its life boot-floppies
was such a nightmare to develop that this *was* a major blocker. A
substantial part of the point in investing so much development effort in
d-i is to fix this perennial problem for the future.

-- 
Colin Watson                                  [cjwatson@flatline.org.uk]