Catching Up
Hrm, haven’t made a “release manager” blog post since August. Nice. Fortunately that’s not entirely representative of how slack I’ve been, but it’s not as far off as might be nice. Due to the aforementioned chaos I’ve been almost completely out of the loop for the past few weeks. On the upside, this has given Colin Walters and Steve Langasek a good chance to show off their mad skillz, which they’ve handled masterfully.
Greeting my return was also news that the glibc maintainers had finalised most of their NPTL work, so that was ready to go into unstable (they’d been developing it in experimental). It seems to have been fairly successful; the only major bug that’s shown up was expected (more or less; it’s been closed with the addition of a FAQ entry; but hopefully there’s a patch from Red Hat that’ll work around the problem automatically).
And as well, the KDE folks have decided that it’s all too much work and reorganised themselves. On the upside, KDE’s been having problems — it hasn’t been updated in testing since woody released (which is to say the updates in unstable have never been bug free enough to be put in the hands of users, although the blame for this has to be shared with the toolchain) — and getting some more effort put into it should hopefully help. On the downside, reorganisations tend to mean absolutely nothing happens for a while, and last I asked, the new KDE team seems to be in a quandry about exactly how to setup their CVS archive. And then, of course, there’s the possibility of group tensions (that are hopefully being defused a bit). Oh well. On the upside, the problems holding KDE out of testing at the moment didn’t seem very severe, so I forced it in. Future updates will be blocked pending more glibc updates, so hopefully that’s timely, and gives them some good news while they’re getting their act together.
One of the things that we really need to start doing (and have needed to do for a while now) is some aggressive removals. In aid of that, and thanks to some hax0ring of britney, Colin, Steve and Joey all have the ability to schedule removals from testing on their own. Sweet.