d-i stall

We're at an interesting point in d-i development now. With rc3, the installer for sarge seems to be done, the number of new problems found in rc3 has been quite small and nobody expects another d-i release will be done before sarge is released. The installer is effectively frozen. Still, there's always the chance that we will need to make a new upload of part of it to fix some unknown, critical problem. Since testing-proposed-updates is still not ready, we have to plan for such uploads still going in to testing through unstable.

And that has put a damper on d-i development going forward, since using unstable is the only way we have to work on new stuff, and we can't yet just upload anything to it and possibly break things. Before rc3, this was sometimes frustrating, but at least led to us concentrating our effort on polishing the installer, manual, etc for sarge. Now it's really feeling like a problem.

We have a ton of things we plan to improve after sarge in d-i; we're branched in svn and ready to go; some development is being done, but we can't pull everything together and produce a working unstable version of the installer. So I find myself worrying about things like lost time, momentum, and what the catch-up period will look like when we finally begin merging things back together again.

The last time I had the pre-release freeze blues, it affected base-config and debconf and debhelper before the release of Debian 3.0. I ended up going away for a year and concentrating most of my effort on non-debian projects then. It seems that the drive to work on d-i is stronger though, so eventually, something will give way. Either t-p-u will finally get set up, or the pressure to diverge unstable from sarge will become strong enough to override the reasons to avoid doing so. Indeed, I think that latter is already beginning to happen.

If we don't get a t-p-u in time, then the two worst cases seem to be that d-i stalls out entirely as we're waiting for sarge to release and it takes a long time afterwards to get things moving again, or that d-i development resumes before sarge release, and sarge ends up being delayed further by side effects of that development. These are not pleasant shoals to navigate between.