Re: Preparing for the Heimdal 7 Release

Jelmer Vernooij <[email protected]> Wed, 19 Oct 2016 23:43:09 +0000
Newsgroups	gmane.comp.encryption.kerberos.heimdal.general
Message-ID	<[email protected]>
On Wed, Oct 19, 2016 at 01:02:43PM -0700, Russ Allbery wrote:
> "Roland C. Dowdeswell" <[email protected]> writes:
> 
> > 	A team consisting of staff from Two Sigma Open Source and AuriStor
> > 	is starting the release process for Heimdal version 7.  We have
> > 	changed the version of the master branch to 6.99.1 which will be
> > 	considered our beta.  During the beta period, we will be fixing
> > 	remaining issues.  In addition, we are asking for the community to
> > 	submit any final patches or bug reports before the 1st of
> > 	November.
> 
> > 	We expect to publish the first release candidate on or near the
> > 	11th of November.
> 
> That's great news!
> 
> There is some possibility that will be fast enough to allow reintroduction
> of Heimdal into the next stable release of Debian, depending on how fast
> the release candidate process converges in a stable release.  However,
> it's going to have to be fairly quick, since the window for making it into
> a stable release is rapidly closing.
> 
> November 5th is the start of stretch transition freeze, after which major
> transitions have to be coordinated with the release team.  Reintroduction
> of Heimdal will probably not qualify as a transition because Debian is
> currently dropping Heimdal entirely from the distribution.

That's indeed awesome news!

However, like Russ says, the timing isn't great.  We've been asking
for a release for years. If this had happened earlier, that would have
saved a lot of unnecessary work on the Debian side. :-(

We've fortunately got a little bit more leeway now that the freeze was
deferred by two months to allow Linux 4.10 to be included.

The full stretch life cycle is documented at
https://wiki.debian.org/DebianStretch

Brian May and I are the current uploaders for Heimdal in Debian.
Because of the lack of releases, I've been coordinating the removal
from stretch (the next Debian release) the last couple of months.

So far the main thing that's happened is that packages that can build
against either Heimdal or MIT and previously built against Heimdal
have switched over to building against MIT.

Heimdal itself is currently still in stretch, but two packages that
build against *both* MIT and Heimdal - libpam (maintained
by Russ) and libpam-krb5-migrate (maintained by myself) - have dropped
support for Heimdal. Requests are open against OpenLDAP and
cyrus-sasl2 to drop Heimdal support.

If we want to have the option of keeping Heimdal iff a release
happens before mid-December, we need to coordinate with the Debian
release team. As a transition, it should be a lot less daunting now
that most dependencies have been removed. Between Russ and
myself, we can upload all packages that depend on Heimdal.

Cheers,

Jelmer
signature.asc (application/pgp-signature, 455 B)