In the 4th quarter of 2016, we will freeze Debian Stretch. If you are hoping to do any larger changes for Stretch, please consider starting on them now. This also includes features that need to be in APT/dpkg (etc.) in Stretch, so we can start using them for Buster.
Even something as “trivial” as the automatic dbgsym packages took over 8 months to “complete” (from the prototype was announced in April). I call it “trivial” because:
- The specs were simple and were fairly easy to implement
- Not to mention, the basic idea was already implemented before in e.g. Ubuntu (albeit differently).
- The chosen implementation only had 3 primary tools affected that truly blocked deploying dbgsym packages in Debian.
- dak
- debhelper
- dpkg
- I have yet to hear anyone being against the idea itself.
- There were some concerns about various implementation details. Fortunately almost all of them had trivial or “obvious” solutions.
- We could deploy dbgsym packages immediately once the primary tools had been patched in/for unstable.
- Compared to Multi-Arch, Build-Profiles etc., where we had to wait till the next release before using the feature.
- It also meant we could immediately test that the feature worked as intended (rather than discovering bugs post release).
NB: There were certainly other parties involved. But these were the most important ones.
Mind you, the dbgsym saga is not complete yet. We are still lacking support for migrating dbgsym packages to testing (and, by extension, the next stable release as well). Meanwhile, you can pull the dbgsym packages from snapshot.debian.org.
In summary: If you want a larger change to land in Debian Stretch, please start already now. :)
Filed under: Debian, Release-Team
