Bug#1006800: debian-installer: kernel mismatch for bookworm and sid installer. New release needed?

[Roland Clobus]

+mailing list rb-general

Hi,

On 05/03/2022 12:40, Cyril Brulebois wrote:
> Roland Clobus <rclobus at rclobus.nl> (2022-03-05):
>> I have noticed that the officially released version debian-installer
>> [2][3] will not work for bookworm and sid, because the kernel version
>> in the debian- installer does not match the current kernel version.
>> You recently fixed this in git [4].
>>
>> Could you release a new version of debian-installer for bookworm and
>> sid?
> 
> We could, and should, release a new d-i and possibly an Alpha 1 at some
> point, but I don't have a specific timeline for that.

Understood. I assume that an Alpha 1 release will be made somewhere near 
the release date of bookworm.

>> Or do you recommend a different (release) strategy?
> 
> A new debian-installer upload (prelude to the aforementioned Alpha 1) is
> only going to help until src:linux gets a new ABI bump, so that's only
> going to be temporary anyway.

Indeed. A new debian-installer upload would need to happen in lock-step 
with every new ABI in src:linux, to guarantee a consistent state of d-i.
This could mean quite some work on your side.

>> I'm aware of the daily images [5], but they are currently not being
>> snapshotted, which makes it impossible to reproduce an image after the
>> older images have been removed from [5].
> 
> If you're using a specific build, you could mirror it on your side, and
> then have a way to point at the mirrored copy so that you wouldn't
> depend on d-i.d.o's contents (that's an approach seen in various
> projects, e.g.  time-based snapshots and tagged snapshots in Tails, even
> if that's for Debian as a whole, not d-i)?

I do not know how much work it is to release a new version of 
debian-installer. Currently the state of the official repository 
(deb.debian.org) is a non-working installer for bookworm and sid.

I'm looking at possible solutions here (that's why I've added the 
rb-general mailing list):
* (Manually) do official releases of debian-installer more often
   (as I wrote, openQA will soon have some tests that detect when the 
kernel version got out-of-sync)
* Automatically release git snapshots to deb.d.o instead of d-i.d.o
* Extend snapshot.d.o and/or snapshot.notset.fr to cover d-i.d.o in 
addition to deb.d.o
* No changes, and accept that older images cannot be recreated (this 
option is not preferred by me)
* Other ...

> How long do you need to go back / how long do you need to keep a given
> build? Maybe we could just keep (some) builds for a longer while there,
> but that's at 90 days already.

Looking at https://d-i.debian.org/daily-images/amd64/, the current 
history I can see is about 15 days.

While investigating reproducible issues I personally tend to pick some 
timestamp and work on that for a longer period of time. 90 days would 
suffice completely for my purpose.

With kind regards,
Roland Clobus
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