releases and such

Until I had a fun time playing frisbee this evening I was quite frustrated at the autobuilders, which have been not building the final build of d-i for our release all week. The system they use for prioritising builds is broken for packages like debian-installer, and so rather than moving up in the queue it's just been sitting there while torrents of last minute uploads of packages come in before it. We've done manual builds for some arches, which is annoying because it sometimes wastes the autobuilder's time later, and because it has the potential to introduce the human element, and thus, mistakes. Which we don't need for a proable release candidate build. Anyway, the timing has been truely bad and the more time we lose now, the less time we'll have to fix whatever issues are found in this release, before Debian itself releases. But maybe libtiff is more important, I can't say. Hmm, I'm still annoyed despite the frisbee, I see.

It's interesting to think back to past Debian releases. I was only mildly involved in the woody release really; my Debian involvement was at an ebb that year. The potato release was a reasonably stressful time, though I don't remember exactly why. Before that there was the slink-and-a-half release, which Sean and I put out ourselves and doesn't really count, and then the first Debian release that I remember being involved in, slink. At the time the website had to be gone over with a big s// to change release names and such, and I participated in that, a little amazed that it had to be done that way. For several years before that, I was a Debian developer, and yet releases just happened on their own, apparently. That was nice.

For this Debian release, I'm helping with d-i; with CDs; with the install manual; I've been looking over what will need to change in the website and hopefully we'll have one switch to throw this time despite all the changes required for d-i; and I hope to help the security team out some. And then there's debian-edu. Luckily I dodged the release assistant bullet, so I can avoid paying attention to many of the testing propigation issues. Colin and Steve are doing a fine job over there, but I can see how AJ could get just a little bit tired of the mass of developers that don't look outside their own packages, and always feel that their fix is the most important thing.

I wish that we had a clear release checklist for Debian that detailed everything that goes on in last weeks, days, and hours before a release, and what depends on what else. I'm sure it would be fascinating. But I doubt we've ever done things the same way twice.

I will be able to go to the last week of the Cabal^HHHnonical conference in Oxford. I do not have any release plans for that week; if d-i is not released by then, someone else will get to do it.. I expect that will be a fun and good work session; I just need to figure out a way to escape the Mao players.