Debian Etch, Lenny and Squeeze packages

[Ben Klein]

2009/2/17 James McKenzie <jjmckenzie51 at earthlink.net>:
> Ben Klein wrote:
>> Debian Lenny has gone stable. YAY! I've already got chroots and my
>> build scripts set up for Debian Squeeze, which is the new testing, so
>> I'll be able to produce packages of Wine for Squeeze without trouble,
>> but there are some issues I'd like comment on.
>>
>> 1) I will not supply packages for Etch/amd64 (this used to be a TODO
>> for me). No negotiation on this, but I am willing to assist people to
>> compile/package it themselves if there's a good reason for not
>> upgrading to Lenny.
>> 2) I'll still build Etch/i386 packages (because it's damn easy for me
>> to do so), but how long should this go on for? Ideally, we should
>> encourage people to upgrade to Lenny.
>>
> Is there a must have feature in Lenny?  Then I would give people 3
> months to upgrade.

I'm not sure I understand what you mean here, but Lenny has the traits
of any new Debian release (a whole lot of new), including libgnutls
that works wine Wine, as well as making it easy to build amd64
packages. Etch/amd64 was missing vital lib32 packages.

> Is there a platform that Lenny does NOT support that
> is in major use (witness the same thing with MacOSX 10.3 to 10.4
> upgrade.  Some platforms, about five percent of all Mac users at the
> time, were left behind.)  If this is true, the time of support may need
> to be longer.

Essentially, Wine only works on ia32. The only ia32 architectures that
Debian supports are i386, amd64 and ia64. Although it should be
possible to support ia64 (since the binaries are ia32 anyway, it
should just be a matter of changing the architecture in the control
file), it's not practical due to
1) Limitations of ia64 architecture in running ia32 applications
2) Inability for me to ensure the packages will install (I have no ia64 CPU)
3) Unpopularity of ia64 compared to amd64

So we don't need to worry about this. And no, it doesn't look like
Debian has dropped any architectures.

>> 3) Do we want to set up a Squeeze repository with 1.1.15 in it, or
>> should we wait until the next release to set up a Squeeze repository?
>> If the former, I will build packages specifically on/for Squeeze -
>> best to do it this way for maximum compatibility.
>>
> The builds for Etch/Lenny/Squeeze need to be separate unless Lenny
> builds will run on Squeeze.

Yes, I know. But should we wait until the next release of Wine to set
up the Squeeze repository? One of the Lenny or Sid packages is pretty
much guaranteed to install on Squeeze.

>> Ideally, I'd like a standardised policy on points #2 and #3, so that
>> we know what's going on for the next release of Debian (I know,
>> long-term planning). Scott, I'd value your opinion too, even though
>> you only do Ubuntu packages now.
>>
> Yes, the policy needs to be in writing.  Debian updates take a long time
> and the next release takes a long time.  However there is a good reason
> for this.

Once we make a final decision here, it can go on the Wiki or the download page.