On Wed, 05 Oct 2022 at 16:34:27 +0200, Philip Hands wrote: > I didn't want to inflict work on the debian-cd > team, and I assume that nobody will object if volunteers turn up to help > build/test the free images. If they're built and tested, I'm pretty sure > they'll be published.
As one of the people who sometimes helps Steve to test CD releases (but not a debian-cd team member): I suspect that one of the motivations for not wanting two sets of images on an equal footing is that building and testing images is a time- and resource-intensive process: by its very nature, building and testing an installation image or a live image involves shovelling a lot of data around, and there's a policy of requiring at least the live images to be tested on real hardware, because there have been cases in the past where the images worked fine on a VM but failed on real hardware. Last time we did bullseye and buster point releases, I left Steve's house well after midnight, and I don't think that's atypical. It would be a much less draining process if the combinatorial explosion of things to test was smaller: at the moment we have netinsts, CDs, DVDs, 16G images for USB sticks, Blu-Ray images, a live image per major desktop environment (for some value of "major"), various paths through the installer, amd64/i386, UEFI/BIOS, non-firmware/firmware and so on. Not producing separate firmware and non-firmware images is one way to speed this up by making the critical path shorter. I suspect the debian-cd team might also be seriously considering discontinuing the larger installation images like the Blu-Ray and 16G USB stick - certainly I would be, if I was them. So if volunteers turn up to help build/test images without non-free firmware, I'm sure nobody is going to object to them doing that work, but it might come with some limitations in order to take that work off the critical path of building and testing the primary deliverable on release day, which will now be the version with firmware: perhaps something like "yes, but only after the primary images are ready" or "yes, but please build only the most useful 1-3 variants per architecture" or something along those lines. smcv