Saturday 6 February 2021

Debian 10.8 release process - We're almost there - Signing and pushing about to happen

 Steve is about to sign the release and to begin the push across to the mirrors.

Although it sometimes seems like an age, this will be approximately 8 hours rather than 15 hours -  a 50% improvement in release timetable means that the behind the scenes work has been well worth while.

We always find tweaks, improvements, things we forgot and genuine bugs. Once again: We've found that live images can be significantly memory intensive on older hardware or machines with limited memory. 

The boot process for any live CD image expands a squashfs so that the image runs entirely in memory. This is particularly noticeable on the 32 bit i386 images. These really require a minimum of 2GB of memory if you are using the heavier weight desktop images like KDE or Gnome: much less and they will either be unreasonably slow or just fail to work.

There is also now a note on the download pages warning on this.

Thanks once again to maswan early on and Sledge, RattusRattus, Isy, Schweer, linux-fan and sqr{not} for helping out in testing images. I'm listening in to an impromptu chat explaining the behind the scenes steps to run to actually sign and push the final images so we're a short while away from publishing to the principal CD image machine. At the same time, the torrent seeders will be started and the scripts will push to update the mirrors. And so to the next time :)

Handy tip For people running mirrors of debian-cd: If you're low on disk space, perhaps you could remove the 10.7 images by hand before running your next sync scripts to allow space for 10.8 to move in: any ftpsync or rsync process might only remove the old images after copying in the new ones. It's only about 220GB - but you don't want that to be an instantaneous 440GB.

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