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.

Debian 10.8 release process - And there are always small bugs which catch you out :)

 This is going very well - we've finished many of the tests. A few oversights - a few changes as we've realised we've missed a couple of things: it's always the same, small bugs catch you out as you spot them and Sledge is fixing as we go. A couple of bandwidth glitches for me but nothing special.

Thanks also to Linux-fan and Sqrt{not} who have turned up to help and each taken a couple of tests. Any contribution is a help because it means we get things done faster and, crucially, we get different hardware and another pair of eyes working with us. We'd hoped that we'd be mostly done by 1700 - we didn't specify which time zone.

The release announcement for the point release as a whole has gone out: with luck, we should have all the media released by later tonight so 20210206 which will be faster than before.

Debian 10.8 release process - Yay, it's a lot faster

Thanks to the changes behind the scenes, images are now being produced significantly faster than they were: the embarrassingly parallel speed up has worked, though at slight cost to the predictability of when we get each architecture produced for us to test.

Thanks, as ever, to Sledge, RattusRattus and Isy over in Cambridge and to schweer who painstakingly tests all the debian-edu releases.

83 out of 94 steps done and it's only 13:50 GMT - less popular architectures are coming on apace. There's still a lot of testing to do: we will never be able to test s390x for example. Other architectures - including mips* - we have no machines, we're building as best efforts and we can't guarantee how well they will work for anyone.

Anybody installing the less popular architectures please let us know that you've installed them and how you get on. We'd like to see a positive report as well as bugs: we don't see much feedback at all to know how useful they are: evidence of installs on any architecture is always helpful to us.

And here we go: Debian 10.8 images release testing process is under way

 As is traditional, every three months or so: another Debian point release is being prepared today. This one is 10.8. As ever, not a huge amount of change if you've been updating your Debian machines regularly. CD/DVD/BluRay and other media files are all being produced today.

 Images are gradually being built and rsync'ed: tests are under way and the ususal suspects are taking part. A couple of issues: thanks very much indeed to maswan for chasing up early problems with petersson. 

Some script changes behind the scenes over the last month or so should mean that the images are built significantly more in parallel and this may mean we finish the release process much more quickly today.

 

And the last few architectures are getting done - Debian 10.7 edging ever closer

 And we're through the live images as far as we can reasonably go. There remain a couple of MIPS architectures to build and IBM s390x - we have no hardware to test these.

It's now 23:30 UTC - so that's 12 1/2 hours since we started and Sledge has another couple of hours to wait before the last images can be signed and the image release can be pushed.

Thanks so much to Sledge, RattusRattus, Isy, Schweer and jlsantos - who came back to us after a significant internet outage local to them in California - to those who popped by - hi Kibi and Manty - and to all who labour behind the scenes to make each release "just work"

Here's to the next one - in another couple of months, I'm guessing.

Lots further forwards - but moving slowly through live CD testing

All of the testing of the normal Debian images has gone through the steps we lay out. We're now working on the Debian live CDs which take significantly longer per image.

Looks like a long night until Steve is ready to sign the release and begin the final transfer - however much we try to minimise it, it's a 12-15 hour process and my thanks go to RattusRattus and Steve for the final stages of a very long day.

Part way through Debian CD release process - always fun to do - Debian 10.7 in process

 As is normal for these days: I post a quick update on how we're doing.

Working through the test suite: RattusRattus, Sledge, Isy, Schweer and I. We've been joined by somebody new - jlsantos - who has done his first test for us :)

A couple of changes: there's now a different automatic partitioning layout. /boot has been resized to ~500MB - to allow for more than one kernel but also the other initramfs files. The filesystem size allocated for a swap partition is now 1GB by default.

We're doing fairly well - one hardware failure on an old laptop replaced by a newer model from Sledge's stock - everybody cheerful and all working well.

Separately, there was a quiet release of Bullseye Alpha3 last night - that has had minimal testing - as ever, we're not yet near the release of Bullseye yet.