As a matter of principle, I try to avoid any conflict of interest between my release manager and alpha porter hats, by e.g. deferring to my co-RM when there's a question of whether a particular compromise should be made to benefit alpha's releasability. Where Dunc Tank is concerned, that means some changes in priorities for bugs to work on, since I'm being paid to try to get etch out in a timely manner, not to keep the alpha port afloat. OTOH, alpha is not the only arch that produces RC bugs needing release team attention, and Dunc Tank only dictates how I spend 40-50 hours of my week -- which means another 20-30 hours a week of Debian work that I can set my own priorities for, right?
So the theme ingredient over the weekend was: problems on the alpha port.
- NMUed qdbm with a workaround for the long-standing build failure, helpfully filed by Aurélien Gérôme as bug #394626; this in theory makes it possible to get the fix for bug #367374 into testing by the normal route, but now hyperestraier and qdbm both have a very strange build failure on alpha and mips...
- It took quite a bit of time to track down RC bug #378346 in gail, what with all the libraries that needed to be rebuilt from experimental. Turns out to be a garbage collection issue fixed upstream. Who knows why this only showed up on alpha?
- I also poked a bit at the kernel for alpha, for the possibility of supporting installation on TITAN and TSUNAMI class systems. It looks promising to have this in for etch, which would be nice because these are higher-end alphas that could extend the lifetime of the alpha port overall if we can manage to turn that support into something like a new porter machine...
- Then I spent some more time poking at the kernel thanks to 397139, which showed that the fixes to get the kernel building under gcc-4.1 on alpha didn't quite do the trick.
I'll give myself 4/5 points for presentation, 5/5 points for use of the theme ingredient, and 6/10 points for taste (this plastic computer case needs more salt).
And of course, waiting for Debian kernel packages to compile on an LX164 alpha gives one time to do other things too, like following through on the RC bugs that the BTS has wrong version-tracking information for, and preparing an NMU here and there. Less than 200 RC bugs left now, and dropping daily!