Anthony Towns: Debian Woody Freeze Plans – Progress Report

Date: Sat, 7 Apr 2001 18:44:01 +1000
From: Anthony Towns <ajt@debian.org>
Subject: Woody Freeze Plans - Progress Report

In short: there hasn't been any, go help Adam and David with
boot-floppies.

The optimistic schedule is roughly as it was before, but with the dates
bumped back by a couple of months:

        2001.05.01 -- working boot-floppies, preview release of woody,
                      begin finalising policy, get rid of all RC bugs
                      in the base system
        2001.06.01 -- policy freeze: no changes to policy, no more packages
                      added to the base system, finalise the base system,
                      fix all RC bugs in standard/b-f's
        2001.07.01 -- base system frozen, no new packages in standard,
                      fix RC bugs in optional/extra
        2001.08.01 -- standard frozen, no new packages in optional/extra
        2001.09.01 -- optional/extra frozen, final security updates
        2001.09.15 -- release

That's still ridiculously optimistic though. A more realistic schedule,
based on the time it's taking boot-floppies to get working is probably
more like:

        2001.08.01 -- working boot-floppies
        2002.03.01 -- finished boot-floppies, standard frozen
        2002.04.15 -- release

(with the other dates spread in between somewhere; if we find problems
when we actually get around to testing woody properly there'll be
further delays)

Not having working boot-floppies means we can't do installation testing,
which means we can't get a reasonable handle on whether we need to do
any further development work in the base system or on policy in general,
which means freezing isn't reasonable at present (since we may still
need to do significant development).

Working boot-floppies are, at this point, the key factor determining
whether woody will be released in a reasonable amount of time (ie,
this year), or not. At the moment, it's not looking that promising.

The remaining aspects of the release aren't looking too bad: almost
all the outdatedness in testing is fixed (glibc 2.2, X 4, perl 5.6,
debconf), and the only remaining issues (KDE and Gnome 1.2/1.4) look
like they should be able to be resolved in the next few weeks; hppa,
ia64 and mips are making good use of the delay to get themselves release
ready, so we may have some more architectures to release; and one way
or another we seem well on the way to having almost all of Debian being
more auto-buildable than every before.

Just in case anyone was wondering, anyway.

Cheers,
aj

--
Anthony Towns <ajt@debian.org>
Woody Release Manager