It's time to get a beta release out and get some wider testing. There are some things that are very obviously broken still, such as mkreiserfs hanging. I've collected the worst issues at the top of the TODO. I suggest that we take three more days to try to resolve as many of those isses as we can. That's not much time, but there are not many of these issues, and we'll halt work on anything else, except for safe stuff (translations, template cleanup, etc), to avoid breaking the installer with lots of other last minute changes. Then we document the remaining issues as known bugs, and put out the beta release on Sunday.
Then I suggest that we go into a light freeze of the installer. No changes
to core components that can break other stuff (so no significant
modifications to libdebian-installer, cdebconf's core (but UI fixes are
ok), anna, main-menu, etc). If you absolutly have to make big changes,
you'll have to do it in a branch, and in experimental. I think this freeze
should last a month, and we can take this time to do a lot of important
stuff:
- Polish all the templates.
- Give the porters a less moving target, and a month to get a port done.
We should aim to complete at least two ports in this month.
- Get translations 100% up-to-date, against a less moving target.
(This may involve a 1 week "string freeze".)
- Find and fix UI problems, like backup support everywhere.
- Get a coherent set of debian-installer images and udebs into the
testing distribution, so that Debian can include d-i in its own
freeze and beta release as part of its release cycle.
- Gather lots and lots of installation reports.
- Get major missing subsystems (wireless, ppp, etc) fully working.
- Add more filesystem types, more hardware support, raid, whatever.
All the stuff that just involves adding a new udeb to the installer.
- Finish the user manual.
- Figure out any major architectural changes we will need to do later.
After this month of er, frost, we'll have a nicely polished version of the
installer to release, and a good idea of what the big unfixed bugs in that
release will be. So we'll take stock and decide whether we need to open the
tree back up to large changes for a while (and for how long), or whether we
can go into a firmer freeze. Then rinse, lather, repeat until done.
--
see shy jo
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