d-i rc3 released

It's done!

(Disclaimer: If above link is a 404, it may not be.)

Doing a release like this is stressful partly because of all the waiting. I've found an excellent way to deal with this: If I can do some nice demolition work with a crowbar in between waiting for people to become available and finalize things, waiting for images to build, transfer, and web sites to update, then I am much happier. So I happily helped my dad tear down his old back porch this afternoon. Just don't make me stop before the waiting is done, please.

Even though we've done these releases several times in the past year, and even though I've learned the hard way to automate it as much as possible and that manually cutting corners to save time generally doesn't, there is always some new challange or odd little bit that has to be fixed up by hand, and often this leads to mistakes. Sometimes we get a cascading failure mode, such as:

1. The scheduled weekly build of the CDs is not usable for the release, for $REASON_I_HAVE_HAPPILY_FORGOTTEN.
2. Build machine is badly overloaded, so move some of the CD builds to another machine.
3. Now the new machine updates the cd image archive, and oops, the update program does not expect this and deletes everything the other machine had uploaded.
4. Now a stressed admin who is up too late runs another rsync to fix this. But oops, it's reversed and he deletes all the images off the first machine too.
5. Thank goodness for multi-hundred-terabyte tape libraries. Pity they involve even more waiting..

Anyway, it's done, and exactly on schedule too.