The sixth Debian Installer team meeting was held from 20:00UTC to 20:50UTC
on Wednesday October 19th 2005.

There were about 72 people connected to the channel during the meeting
and 11 of them spoke during the meeting at least once.

The full log of the meeting is available at
http://people.debian.org/~bubulle/d-i/irc-meeting-20051019/log

Beta release status
-------------------

The wiki page at http://wiki.debian.org/DebianInstallerEtchBeta1Prep gives
the current status of the beta release.

Several problems were very recently reported and are summarized while
being dealt with on the "DI-Today" page:
http://wiki.debian.org/DebianInstallerToday.

Most of them are problems in non-DI packages such as:

apt         : secure-apt cannot validate packages installed from CD's
adduser     : wrong parameters used
debootstrap : stops being able to install testing
psmcia-cs   : cannot automatically load modules

All these have been dealt and are on their way. The packages need to
enter testing though (uploads have been hinted with high urgency to
speed this up).

The manual split should make things easier from now. Packages are on
their way.

All arches seems to be building which is good news.

The first testing images are expected, if nothing more shows up, on
the next week-end. Then, testing will have to be done, as usual.

Ongoing development
-------------------

from the beta release topic, ongoing development was discussed. As
usual, a release tends to block new development. However, the
requirements for this release are quite loose, so new features can
already be thinked about...and some maybe worked on.

A few major goals are mentioned:

-switch to udev: 
                 The consensus seem to be "let's do it and see what
                 breaks".  Some think that barely standard things
                 should be working and only more exotic things could
                 be broken by the udev switch.

-supplemental repository for udebs:
                 This could be an interesting feature to allow more
                 development even during ease preparations. The point
                 is allowing D-I to pull udebs from a supplemental
                 repository where devels could put experimental udebs
                 for testing

-apt-setup:
                 part of base-config slow removal. Needs wide testing
                 so should happen ASAP

Graphical installer
-------------------

The general consensus is: wow!

The progress on the GTK installer has been amazing. It is now nearly
releasable.

Nearly all the bricks needed to build it regularly and remove the
current hacks are on their way. The soon to come progress is
cdebconf-gtk being built with recently uploaded GTK libs.

Fonts and other graphical thingies need involving font packages
maintainers. Frans suggested sending some notices to the
debian-gtk-gnome list. An announcement will also be made on
debian-devel-announce.

A few usability issues are already raised here and there such as
alignment problems in localechooser and partman. They draw some
discussions about new possibly needed functionalities (columns for
getting stuff properly aligned in localechooser and partman for
instance), which Colin Watson suggests implementing with the debconf
plugin mechanism.

Work on powerpc builds by Eddy Petrisor and Frans Pop. Other possible
arches such as amd64 and sparc are mentioned.

All agree that the GTK installer should be made available as soon as
possible in the regular build system, just after the beta, if
possible.

D-I bug-squashing party
----------------------

Joey mentions he did some big work on sorting out D-I bugs, based on
usertags decided at last meeting (yes, this is an issue we decided at
last meeting and actually really achieved!).

The D-I bugs wiki page is now ready
(http://wiki.debian.org/DebianInstallerBugs) and could be the support
for a bug-squashing party.

Some agreement raises to organise it as soon as the beta release is
out, possible "one week or so" after the release. Details are not
decided yet.

The issue of closing old installation reports (sarge beta3 and earlier
versions) is still opened. These bugs are not listed on the D-I bugs
page.


Conclusion
----------
Next D-I team meeting is scheduled for Saturday November 19th, 16:00UTC.

The meeting ends up at 20:50 with no more topics to discuss formally.