The seventh Debian Installer team meeting was held from 16:00UTC to 17:06UTC on Saturday November 19th 2005. There were about 69 people connected to the channel during the meeting and only 6 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-20051119/log Meeting participants -------------------- As stated above, there were very few attendants to the meeting. At the beginning of the meeting, we were only four people and two more showed up during the meeting (including Holger Levsen just telling he currently has very few time to work on D-I). Given that very low attendance, many of the scheduled topics have been covered very briefly. However, we decided to hold the meeting anyway. user-setup-udeb --------------- The question is about moving password questions and users setup to stage1. This is currently achieved in stage2 by passwd.config, from the shadow package. First tests have used an initial-passwd-udeb produced by the shadow package, similarly to the way Ubuntu does. Christian's proposal is moving this code to a udeb named "user-setup-udeb", maintained by the D-I team. The udeb is ready for use. No deep objection has been raised to this proposal and the udeb will be soon added to the main tree. The user setup code will be kept in shadow as long as D-I beta1, which needs it, will be supported (D-I stage2 is the only place where this code is used). The goal is having this code removed for etch release. Some sync will need to take place with Ubuntu to achieve the transition. D-I BSP ------- Joey suggested that a D-I bugsquashing party could be held on some week-end. First plans were organizing it this week-end (Nov. 19-20) but other constraints prevented this to happen. Frans has a few doubts about the real impact of a D-I BSP. Otavio suggests holding it during the next "general" BSP. Switch to 2.6.14 - switch to udev --------------------------------- Both issues are related. Most things are in place for 2.6.14 transition and we are waiting for 2.6.14 for i386 to pass through NEW. Frederik Schueler commited changes to kernel-wedge so linux-di-amd64-2.6 can just include pcmcia-modules and scsi-extra-modules. It is mentioned that, as a general consideration, the current moment is good for "risky" changes which could break some stuff. The only limit is keeping the installer alive enough for 2.6.14 to be tested proeprly. Discover status --------------- The above discussion lead to discuss about the status of discover packages (discover1 and discover2). Discover will still be needed for 2.4 installs even when the transition to udev will have taken place for 2.6 installs. Otavio Salvador is trying to merge databases and start dropping discover1. One drawback is the increased size. Otavio plans trying to get rid of libxml2 by writing an XML parser to be used in D-I. As a conclusion, merging the databases is the first goal to achieve and "we'll see later" how to switch to discover2. apt-setup status ---------------- Apt-setup is now used on the daily builds. First reports (by Frans and Christian) do not show bad behaviour. It's now time to stress it a little..:-) Status of the graphical installer --------------------------------- Davide Viti joining the meeting helps discussing this topic a little more than others (having Frans here also as he involved a lot of time in g-i). "g-i" now seems to be the widely accepted name when talking about "the graphical version of the Debian Installer". Pronounce "Gee-Aye"..:-) The mainblocker to include g-i builds in daily builds is a dpkg-dev patch to solve udeb dependency resolution. The missing udebs for fonts are not blocking as we have a good workaround but this is still an issue that has to be worked on. Frans proposes setting up a wiki page to track down issues related to g-i. He also reminds that his personal involvment in g-i will slow down starting from now. We remain optimistic about the future of g-i: it is now a very good exposure case for GTKFB which upstream shows great interest and support. Solutions to blocking problems such as crashes when switching to other virtual consoles are very close. Customizable themes is recognized as an interesting feature to offer, not only for solving issues related to color blindness but also to offer good customization opportunities to derived distributions. Frans will very soon send an official annoucement about g-i. This will need us to handle the installation report we will get immediately after this. This is a good occasion to remind about BTS usertags which have been setup for installation reports triage. Switch to codenames instead of suite in sources.list ---------------------------------------------------- There seems to be a majority of people and support for this, according to last meetings minutes. Some basic support for this is already in choose-mirror and cd/iso-scan. The next step is support in base-installer and apt-setup. UTF-8 as default ---------------- Beta1 has it for a few languages which formerly used ISO locales as default. One of the releases goals for beta2 is switching all Latin-based languages to UTF-8 as default. Locales packages switch to belocs-locales ----------------------------------------- The issue should be discussed in -devel. The need is more reactivity for new languages as the locales package is constrained by its upstream. Beta2 schedule -------------- Frans mentions that a good target for beta2 release could be the end of January. Conclusion ---------- Next D-I team meeting is scheduled for Wednesday December 14th, 21:00UTC. The meeting ends up at 17:06 with no more topics to discuss formally.