today's d-i hacking

Today was fairly restrained. Although I did upload linux-kernel-di three times. But really nothing much to do turned up until Manty found a problem with CD installs that made them skip configuring the network. That turned out to be a bug caused/exposed by Joshk's recent main-menu change that makes it not jump backwards to before completed menu items. Changing two numbers in d-i fixed it. It seems that in d-i, 90% of the work to fix a bug is simply in reproducing it.

Testing that change, I tested installs from floppy (in vmware), and that is much more slick than it used to be. Also tested install from a real CD (first time in ages), and I even booted using a 3 mb initrd on a keychain and then installed from CD.

We've just put the bterm unifont reload issue for Chinese and other similar languages to bed, which is kinda scary as it involves the first code change to anna since November. But this was the last item on the release checklist that does involve ports, testing, or archive work, so it's good to see it fixed.

Now we just need to get more arches ready. In some cases that involves only testing. I have thought about mailing the debian-arch lists to try to get testers, but I guess I'll try this blog entry first. If you use powerpc, ia64, sparc, m68k, hppa, mips, alpha, or s390, please try our current daily built images for your architecture from our web site, and send us an installation report. Otherwise, your arch may not be included in the next release. All of these have a nonzero chance of working, I need to know if the probability is in the 0-50%, 50-75%, or 75-99% range.

Ah yes, something interesting. Kamion was on #debian-boot today and we chatted about him making a ssh-udeb. This won't be ready in time for the upcoming release on the 15th, but when we do get it, it will be pretty neat to be able to ssh into running d-i systems! Especially for debugging those hard to reproduce problems.