Since the previous blog post, two Debian Installer release candidates were published, so both will be mentioned in this blog post.
As mentioned in the Plans
section of the Stretch Alpha 8 summary: with the full freeze coming up, it
made sense to switch from the Alpha
numbering to the Release Candidate
one. That’s why Cyril
published the Debian Installer
Stretch RC 1 release on 2017-01-15.
Unfortunately, some blockers were found with merged-/usr
setups, so the new
debootstrap
default was reverted. Even if some of these bugs were fixed in the meanwhile, it seemed
unreasonable to enable the new code again near the end of the stretch
release cycle, so it’s going
to be postponed until after the buster
release cycle has started.
Here is a list of other changes:
apt-setup
component has been tweaked so that it offers to scan more discs depending on the
installation image. This should make it easier to handle several installation media, for example when extra
firmwares are needed.netcfg
) will now write fewer lines in
/etc/network/interfaces
when a static configuration has been chosen: netmask, network, and
broadcast lines are going away, since setting the prefix length is likely sufficient.HTTPS
repositories, through the addition of a wget
udeb
(along with trusted certificate authorities through another ca-certificates
udeb), which replaces
the wget
command provided by the busybox
package (which only comes with a limited set
of features).softWavestheme happened, and the bug fix for the remote installations has been merged as well.
Since the Linux kernel team was finally moving towards the target kernel version for Stretch (4.9, even if
earlier discussions mentioned 4.10), it seemed like a good idea to get a new Debian Installer released as soon as
possible, which explains why Debian Installer Stretch RC 2 was
released on 2017-02-02, only a few weeks after Stretch RC 1
.
Another significant change happened besides the Linux kernel update, with the os-prober
component
receiving major changes. Let’s have a look at its description:
Package: os-prober Description: utility to detect other OSes on a set of drives This package detects other OSes available on a system and outputs the results in a generic machine-readable format.
This component is used to determine which other operating systems might be hanging around on various
partitions and discs, and it’s used e.g. by update-grub
to include menu entries for other
Linux distributions, Windows, etc. Unfortunately, its historical operating system detection code has been
triggering issues in some environments involving virtualization, which ended up in data loss in some cases.
The relevant code was heavily overhauled, and one might hit some regressions with new versions of this
component (1.72 and later). Details about these significant changes can be found in the changelog entry for the
1.72 upload, and one might notice that the preparations for
this new release candidate resulted in a last-minute regression fix in the 1.74 upload. Similar issues have been reported with the
dmsetup create
command hanging, leading to a frozen progress indicator when grub
is
being set up (see bug report #853927). This can be worked around by
switching to a console and killing the dmsetup
process (see this message for more details), until this issue is fully diagnosed and
fixed.
With the full freeze in effect, Debamax is trying to make sure Cyril can spend as much time as possible on two complementary tasks:
Stretch RC 1and
Stretch RC 2which have been filed lately. That’s usually how the Debian Installer team learns about regressions and use cases for which the installation process isn’t flawless.
More to come in our next Debian Installer report!