Status of Emdebian Grip

There are point releases of stable and oldstable coming up soon and I
am reconsidering the status of Emdebian Grip.

Point releases take a lot of time to organise in Grip - typically an
entire weekend, so some have already been missed. There are several
reasons for this:

0: There is no automated migration of packages into testing or
proposed-updates. Having two separate update processes uploading to the
same archive is problematic.

1: It doesn't make much sense to have the newest packages in unstable
and stable, so testing needs to be updated before the point release can
be prepared. If we ignore testing, why retain stable updates at all?
Testing is the next stable.

2: I'm finding I have less time to spend on manually fixing testing. It
always takes the same amount of time and the delays in implementing PPA
support in Debian are persisting.

3: I'm seeing almost no discussion on this list or on IRC about Grip -
now this could be "no news is good news" but I *know* there are
dependency problems in unstable and testing from time to time (the
daily processing sends me a lot of email) but nobody mentions it. There
are a lot of complaints about the toolchain situation but as I have
reduced amounts of time for Grip, my toolchain time is nigh on zero.

4: I've stopped needing to use Grip in any active manner. My work now
concentrates on ARMv7 and later, where storage is simply not a concern.
Most of the ARM devices I now use and care about support both 64Gb SD
and SATA.

5: The only "maintained" suite in Grip is unstable - where the
maintenance involves automated scripts which are principally aimed at
the full Debian integration which is still delayed.

Riku commented, when Grip was first announced, that storage was not
going to remain the principle problem for Emdebian systems and the
availability and affordability of 64Gb SD cards means that this is now
the reality.

Emdebian Grip has no role in "resource limited" deployments other than
reducing the storage requirements, so if the ARM boards currently in
active usage have no practical storage limits, it is time to reconsider
the work involved in maintaining Emdebian Grip. (Other architectures
were added to Grip simply because we could, there never was any
particular use case for architectures other than armel. Most armhf
devices had already moved away from storage constraints. Reducing the
number of architectures in Grip would not reduce the complexity of the
update process at all.)

If you have interest in retaining Grip *and are prepared to provide
some solutions to the issues above* then say so here. Otherwise,
neither testing not point releases will get updates and we then ought
to consider if unstable is worth retaining.

-- 


Neil Williams
=============
http://www.linux.codehelp.co.uk/

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