Why is my package blocked?

Sun, 10 Aug 2014 19:45:00 +0200
d-i, debian, release-team

A bit of history: A while ago udeb-producing packages were getting frozen on a regular fashion, when a d-i release was about to be cut. While I wasn’t looking at the time, I can easily understand the reasons behind that: d-i is built upon many components, it takes some time to make sure it’s basically in shape for a release, and it’s very annoying when a regression sneaks in right before the installation images get built.

I took over d-i release maintenance in May 2012 and only a few uploads happened before the wheezy freeze. I was only discovering the job at the time, and I basically released whatever was in testing then. The freeze began right after that (end of June), so I started double checking things affecting d-i (in addition to or instead of the review performed by other release team members), and unblocking packages when changes seemed safe, or once they were tested.

A few uploads happened after the wheezy release and there’s already a Jessie Alpha 1 release. I was about to release Jessie Beta 1 after some fair bits of testing, a debian-installer upload, and the only remaining bits were: building installation images (hello Steve), and of course communication (mail announce and website update).

Unfortunately a new upstream release reached testing in the meanwhile, breaking the installer in several ways. I’ll give details below, of course not because I want to point finger at the maintainer, but to illustrate the ramifications that a single package’s migrating to testing can induce.

parted 3.2-1 was uploaded on 2014-07-30 and migrated on 2014-08-05.

parted 3.2-2 fixed a regression reported in Ubuntu only (LP#1352252) which I also hit with images built locally after that migration.

I then built some images locally using fixed parted packages but then discovered that auto-lvm was still broken, which I reported in #757417.

After some investigation Colin confirmed some behavioral changes in this new parted release, which imply the need for an update of several other partman-* components: #757661, #757662, #757663, #757664, #757665, #757666.

Thankfully fixes have been added for all of those, but more testing is needed before possibly urgenting those packages so that they get into testing as soon as possible.

Since I’d like to avoid such experience in the future, I’ll probably reintroduce the old method and freeze all udeb-producing packages during next d-i releases.

So you know why it might happen. Your next question might be: “What to do when your package is getting caught in that net?”. In that case, please get in touch with both debian-release@ and debian-boot@ asking for an unblock. I’ll then review your particular package, and either let it migrate to testing, or delay it until after the release.

Update: official announcement.