If you have been involved in Ubuntu development in Noble for the past month, you are almost certainly aware of the ongoing time_t transition, to ensure that software we ship for the armhf architecture in Ubuntu 24.04 LTS is capable of handling timestamps beyond the year 2038. You will be aware of this because this has been a significantly disruptive transition, blocking most other fixes from being able to reach the release pocket in Noble for some time now.
Originally targeted to land in Debian and Ubuntu in early January, this transition has effectively landed 2 months late, arriving in Ubuntu right before feature freeze. This has put us in a bit of a time crunch to get this work done in time to ensure that the upcoming Beta release in a little over 2 weeks includes images that accurately reflect what the team plans to ship in 24.04 LTS. Getting all of the affected packages built and in a position to transition into the release pocket from noble-proposed in less than 2 weeks represents a huge amount of work, especially with long dependency chains affecting some of these packages. However, with the decision to not ship a 32-bit kernel for Raspberry Pi in 24.04 LTS, it is important to recognize that, while it is important that any software we DO ship on armhf is appropriately future-proof, this is NOT the same thing as saying that we have to ship for armhf all the software that we have previously built. In order to appropriately prioritize the needs of the Beta (including for our community flavors), effective immediately, the Release Team is enacting a policy that armhf binaries for all leaf packages in universe, if they are blocking the transition of any time_t library and ESPECIALLY if they are blocking the transition of a library that’s present on a release image, should be summarily removed from the release pocket in order to let the transition move forward. If you are trying to get any library to migrate and you see that it is blocked by an armhf-specific issue, please contact an Archive Admin (e.g. highlighting ubuntu-archive on #ubuntu-release on IRC) providing the name of the source package whose binaries should be removed, and a reference to what it’s blocking on <https://ubuntu-archive-team.ubuntu.com/proposed-migration/update_excuses.html>, and we can remove these packages to move the release forward. This does not mean the package in question will not be shipped on armhf in 24.04. It is still possible for the binaries to be built afterwards, and included in the release. It is simply prioritizing the needs of the 24.04 release cycle over armhf coverage of any particular binary packages. For folks working on +1 maintenance, here are some further hints. * Packages containing libraries that need to migrate for time_t will generally have an NMU version number in -proposed (with or without an Ubuntu-specific version number after) and at the moment, are 18 days or newer (uploads having started on February 28). Please focus on these packages. * Packages listed as 'missing build on armhf' certainly warrant investigation (for fixing or removal). * Packages involved in the transition which have autopkgtest failures listed on architectures OTHER THAN armhf definitely require investigation. * Libraries which are part of this transition that say “Will attempt migration”, but are more than a day or so old, may require no-change rebuilds of their reverse-dependencies using https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-devel/2022-April/041994.html or a similar script. On behalf of the Release Team, -- Steve Langasek
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