Transitions in progress

[Colin Watson]

I've been doing, er, rather a lot of rebuild uploads to Oneiric
recently, and I thought maybe it might be a good idea to explain what's
going on.  (There's a novel approach for you.)

We currently have four major transitions in progress, that I'm aware of:

  * Perl 5.12
    http://orangesquash.org.uk/~laney/transitions/perl.html

    You've almost certainly noticed this if you've attempted an upgrade
    to Oneiric.  This is mostly done now, and is down to a few handfuls
    of build failures of various levels of oddness.  I've mostly run out
    of steam on diagnosing this lot, so if anyone would like to attack
    some of the failures so that we can get rid of the last 5.10
    dependencies, please do.

    In order to actually remove libperl5.10, we'll also need to fix
    http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=581950.

  * GHC 7
    http://orangesquash.org.uk/~laney/transitions/ghc.html

    Iain Lane is tracking this, and I gather most of it requires more
    than just no-change rebuilds, so I'm leaving him to it. :-)  This
    doesn't intersect much with other transitions, since most Haskell
    packages are standalone rather than parts of packages that ship
    bindings for several different languages.

  * OCaml 3.12.0

    I've been doing rebuilds for this.  With a few exceptions, this
    seems fairly straightforward, and is mainly hampered by the armel
    buildds being somewhat behind.  It's over 70% complete.

  * OpenSSL 1.0.0

    I've done some rebuilds for this, but it's only around 40% complete.
    I expect this will still take a while.  Unlike the Perl transition,
    though, this tends not to cause significant amounts of
    uninstallability, since libssl0.9.8 and libssl1.0.0 are
    coinstallable (as well-behaved library packages should be).

The transition tracker pages operated by Iain Lane are based on his
modifications of Debian's tracker at
http://release.debian.org/transitions/, which I think the Debian OCaml
guys invented.  I'm working with our sysadmins on getting it set up
somewhere in the datacentre, and the plan is to make it straightforward
for anyone in the ~ubuntu-transition-trackers team to be able to set up
a tracker.  I'll add OCaml and OpenSSL pages once that facility is
available.

Cheers,

-- 
Colin Watson                                       [cjwatson at ubuntu.com]