Now that 3.1r2 is out and we've got kernel updates with ABI change scheduled for r3, it's time to start thinking about updating the installer for stable.
Here's a proposal how to deal with this. If there are any weak points in the plan, feel free to shoot holes in it. The main thing that need to be done is rebuilding the installer images using the new kernel udebs. This is somewhat of a challenge though as a) it has never been done before, and b) it means building the images using udebs from s-p-u. Besides that a new version of base-installer is needed because that has the ABI hardcoded for kernel installation on alpha. Note that releasing a new d-i with ABI updates will break some existing installation images: netboot, floppy (net-drivers), s/390 images. All CD-based installations should still work, except for alpha businesscard. This will need to be mentioned in the release announcement. The rough plan is to first test that building using udebs from s-p-u works for i386, then upload updated kernel udebs for other arches, then upload d-i for an official build. In more detail: 1) Upload new i386 kernel udebs for both 2.4 and 2.6 to s-p-u (I've already prepared a set) 2) Get these acked by SRM so they actually show up in s-p-u; s-p-u already has debian-installer sections, I'm not sure if the acceptance queue and approval stuff supports udebs though (aj?) 3) Try a local build of d-i using a sources.list that has both stable and s-p-u in it [1]. 4) If this works, poke^Wask porters to upload updated kernels udebs for their arches. 5) Upload new base-installer. 6) Get those uploads acked by SRM. 7) Upload d-i and let the buildds do their stuff. [1] This should just work as d-i just uses apt to fetch udebs when building images. There are two options: - hack the Makefile to generate a "sources.list.udeb" that contains both stable and s-p-u - add a "sources.list.udeb.local" in the upload to override the default denerated sources.list.udeb and have that contain the two source lines I'm inclined to use the second option and just put a well-known good mirror like ftp.nl.d.o in there. This also means that this is independent of the buildds themselves to have s-p-u in their sources lists, which elmo raised as a possible issue on IRC yesterday. The main problem is going to be testing the new images as it will not be possible to run an installation and download kernel udebs from s-p-u and other udebs from stable. So, we'll either just have to just release and test images immediately after (together with testing CDs), or While researching this I noticed that there are two udebs (for preseeding) currently in s-p-u that were originally uploaded to t-p-u, These were intended for the original Sarge release, but somehow never made it. They should probably be included in 3.1r3 too. Cheers, FJP
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