8.2.1 Release Status - Thursday, Jan. 29, 2008

[Michael Stone]

Folks,

I just thought I'd offer some unofficial advice on the state of 8.2.1 for
interested listeners:

   a) In the last several weeks, there has been significant package churn at all
      levels of the stack including:

        kernel bootanim bootfw olpc-utils libX11 xkeyboard-config sugar-journal
        glibc glibc-common
   
      as described in more detail by
     
        http://dev.laptop.org/~bert/staging-pkgs.html and
        http://dev.laptop.org/~rwh/announcer/staging-pkgs.html
  
      As a result, we're bottle-necked on QA.

   b) Some dedicated volunteers -- notably S Page, dsd, TJB, kimquirk, Hal
      Murray, genesee, tiesj, greebo, Mikus, John Ferlito, and ivazquez (thanks
      all!) -- have done some fine work getting us unstuck on QA!

      In particular, their volunteer wifi testing turned up #9222 which dsd
      thinks he fixed this morning from Paraguay! However, I think that there
      might be more wireless regressions -- please keep trying to break things
      with recent staging builds!

   c) Mitch has worked long and hard on #9045, which was one of the tickets
      motivating this release!

      Today, he delivered a new firmware, q2e30, which you should all help
      test.  It's available in staging >= 25 and it needs both serious
      regression testing, e.g.

         http://wiki.laptop.org/go/1_hour_smoke_test

      and some dedicated feature testing according to the test plan laid out by
      Mitch here:

         http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Firmware_security#Multiple-Key_Support

      (I had so much fun making my own keys last night that I stayed up after an
      evening out on the town with Henry & friends to help Mitch test this!)
   
   d) Somebody needs to provide appropriate activities for our smoke tests
      (preferably via customization stick) and to make sure that those
      activities are properly listed on the usual laptop.org wiki pages. Help
      wanted!  

      Wade -- is this something that your new activity team would like to help
      with?

   e) In conclusion, 8.2.1 seems to me to have been put back on track by the
      unrivaled commitment of you, our dedicated Friends in Testing. Thanks!

Regards,

Michael

(P.S. - Thanks also to Chris for keeping things rolling by wrangling builds and
tickets at all hours of the day.) :)

(P.P.S. - If you're looking for something to test this week, please try out my
refreshed 

  http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Friends_in_testing

instructions!)