Upcoming xulrunner transition

[Mike Hommey]

On Sat, Jun 07, 2008 at 10:15:50PM +0200, Andreas Barth wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> * Mike Hommey (mh at glandium.org) [080607 09:08]:
> > - I upload both iceweasel and xulrunner rc2 releases to unstable, after
> >   I'm ready to upload them, and after you tell me I can go on, if my
> >   network connection permits.
> 
> There is this comment from Matthias (doko) about xulrunner which will
> help us with (not only) this transition:
> 
> | - either make the -dev and the -common packages architecture
> |   dependant. ftp space is not the only thing to consider when
> |   making a decision about arch/indep packages.
> |
> | - or loosen the dependencies; I hardly doubt that the dependencies
> |   need to be as strict as they currently are. To loosen those the
> |   package maintainer needs to monitor the upstream changes. This
> |   is more effort, but can be done, e.g. GCC packaging is done in
> |   a way to reduce dependencies and to ease transitions. It's more
> |   effort in package maintainance, but helps overall.
> 
> I'd appreciate if you could do these changes - the first one shouldn't
> be too complicated.

Only 4 years ago, Steve McIntyre filed bugs on arch-dependent packages
containing a large amount of arch-independent data. Have things changed
in the last 4 years ?
OTOH, the -dbg packages are already huge and one of them represents as
much waste as all the binary-indep packages together.
Anyways, the second option is out of question, I already spend too much
time on xulrunner, and don't want to spend more.
Now, if only I (or anyone else, actually) had time to fix #246992, which
is the real problem...

> Provided this is done, uploading xulrunner to unstable is ok with the
> release team. (And I hope that your network issues are fixed fast, or
> you're in spite of them available in case any issues pop up - quite an
> unfortunate timing.)

While I was fortunate to have a few hours of stable (though slow)
network connectivity yesterday, it is now back to the broken state,
with only sporadic access, a few seconds at a time.
I can successfully send some mail through (with a while true; do
exim -qff; done loop, but sometimes the SMTP session is cut right
before the end, but after the message was actually sent, so the
message is sent but still in my queue. Sorry to anyone receiving
several messages from me), download small files (wget -t 0 is my
friend), or, obviously, POP my mail ; but all that takes time.

The timing could have been slightly better... I had time to prepare
iceweasel 3.0~rc2-1 and upload it on gluck (you can find it on
http://people.debian.org/~glandium/, signed and ready to upload, but it
requires xulrunner 1.9 in unstable first...), but by the time I had
xulrunner 1.9 ready, network was already down... It will be hard to
upload any xulrunner release in the current state :-/

If my network stays in this state for the next few days and I can't
upload, maybe I can send an interdiff between the last .diff.gz in
experimental and the new .diff.gz so that someone could upload for me.
Volunteers?

I do hope things will get better before the freeze...

Mike