Release architectures

To: debian-devel-announce@lists.debian.org

Subject: Release architectures

From: Andreas Barth <aba@not.so.argh.org>

Date: Wed, 7 Oct 2009 17:21:32 +0200

Message-id: <[🔎] 20091007152132.GK9745@mails.so.argh.org>

Mail-followup-to: Andreas Barth <aba@not.so.argh.org>, debian-devel-announce@lists.debian.org

Hi, since our recent release update, things have been moving a bit. We'd like to give you the basic status of all our architectures for Squeeze, for details please see the individual mails (and "basic status" doesn't cover all details of course). kfreebsd ~~~~~~~~ It looks like we could really release Squeeze with both a Linux port and a non-Linux port (i.e. kfreebsd-{amd64,i386}. However, we still have about 250 packages in Squeeze which are not installable due to missing dependencies, and 4000 packages not at all in Squeeze for kfreebsd. On the other hand, most of the issues are just "part of a larger transition" and will clear up by itself over time. Also there are good news on the debian-installer for kfreebsd. In all, the port looks very promising, but of course there are still many topics to tackle. For this reason, our testing migration scripts will soon start to treat out-of-date on kfreebsd as a blocking issue for testing migration. Also normal bug severities apply now for kfreebsd-specific bugs (meaning: there could be RC-bugs that are specific for kfreebsd). We will however still allow testing migrations to happen which increase the count of uninstallable packages on kfreebsd only, as the uninstallability-count needs to be a bit lower to turn that off - nothing too dramatic should happen there though. alpha ~~~~~ After we sent mails to debian-alpha last month we came together with the porters to the conclusion that we cannot keep up this port for Squeeze. We will start purging the packages from testing in about a fortnight. Bugs specific to alpha are no longer release critical. amd64 ~~~~~ Everything ok. armel ~~~~~ The buildd speed isn't always as wanted, but work is underway to replace machines with newer hardware. Also there are discussions on getting the buildds within DSA-control after that; we would appreciate that. Anyways, nothing really worries us. hppa ~~~~ Porters have pushed this architecture much forward. The architecture looks overall quite better than it did 6 weeks ago. We hope that this continues this way. Contrary to what we discussed, we will not push hppa to "out-of-date-packages are ok" for testing migration at this time. There is no final decision yet from our side, but we want to avoid the additional effort that putting hppa to "out-of-date-packages are ok" requires from the porters. However to be included within Squeeze, more issues like e.g. the current stability problems need to be resolved. i386 ~~~~ Everything ok. mips* ~~~~~ Mipsel is also suffering from low buildd speed sometimes, but new boards are currently being shipped to hosting, so this should resolve soon. We don't expect really issues for Squeeze. powerpc ~~~~~~~ Nothing to worry right now. s390 ~~~~ Porters spoke to us that there are issues to worry about, especially lack of access to newer hardware. We received generous offers from users of that port, so we currently assume that the issues will be resolved in time for Squeeze. We would like to get buildds DSAed on this architecture as well. sparc ~~~~~ Nothing that needs to worry us for Squeeze but only long-term is how to transition sparc to sparc64. Upstream slowly starts to consider sparc(32) outdated and deprecated, and we need to get to an decision how to deal with that. Might be that multiarch is part of the answer, but deciding what the best answer is needs to be done by porters, and the answer should be given pre-Squeeze (doesn't necessarily need to be fully implemented). Cheers, Andi Debian Release Team