[ Note the cross-posting... ] Hey folks,
Background: we released live images for Stretch using new tooling, namely live-wrapper. It is better than what we had before (live-build) in a number of ways, particularly in terms of build reliability and some important new features (e.g. UEFI support). But it's also less mature and has seen less testing. There have been bugs because of that. I have fixes for most of the ones I know about [1], and I'm still working on more bugfixes yet. While the bugs are annoying, what worries me more is that they were only spotted in release builds. There had been testing versions of live images available for multiple weeks beforehand, presumably with the same bugs included. (Almost) none of them reported. This shows that we don't have enough people using these live images and/or caring about filing bugs. We have a similar lack of involvement in terms of the content of the live images. As I said above, I'm happy that we now have a reliable tool for building our live images - that makes my life much easier. But I honestly have no idea if the multiple desktop-specific live images are actually reasonable representations of each of the desktops. For example, I *seriously* hope that normal KDE installations are not effected by #865382 like our live KDE images. Validation by the various desktop teams would be useful here. The current situation is *not* good enough. I ended up getting involved in live image production because the images needed making, and I was already the main person organising production of Debian's official images. To be frank, I had (and still have) no direct use for the live images myself and I don't *particularly* care about them all that much. Despite that, I've ended up spending a lot of time working on them. A few other people have also spent a lot of time working in this area - thanks are due to those people too. But it's still not enough. If our live images are going to be good enough to meet the standards that Debian users deserve and expect, we need *consistent*, *sustained* involvement from a lot more people. Please tell me if you're going to help. If we don't see a radical improvement soon, I'll simply disable building live images altogether to remove the false promises they're making. [1] https://get.debian.org/images/release/current-live/amd64/iso-hybrid/#issues -- Steve McIntyre, Cambridge, UK. st...@einval.com "...In the UNIX world, people tend to interpret `non-technical user' as meaning someone who's only ever written one device driver." -- Daniel Pead
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