Time for a quick recap of the beginning of the Stretch release cycle as far as the Debian Installer is concerned:

• It took nearly 3 months after the Jessie release, but linux finally managed to get into shape and fit for migration to testing, which unblocked the way for an debian-installer upload.
• Trying to avoid last-minute fun, I’ve updated the britney freeze hints file to put into place a block-udeb on all packages.
• Unfortunately, a recent change in systemd (implementation of Proposal v2: enable stateless persistant network interface names) found its way into testing a bit before that, so I’ve had my share of last-minute fun anyway! Indeed, that resulted in installer system and installed system having different views on interface naming. Thankfully I was approached by Michael Biebl right before my final tests (and debian-installer upload) so there was little head scratching involved. Commits were already in the master branch so a little plan was proposed in Fixing udev-udeb vs. net.ifnames for Stretch Alpha 1. This was implemented in two shots, given the extra round trip due to having dropped a binary package in the meanwhile and due to dak’s complaining about it.
• After the usual round of build (see logs), and dak copy-installer to get installer files from unstable to testing, and urgent to get the source into testing as well (see request), I’ve asked Steve McIntyre to start building images through debian-cd. As expected, some troubles were run into, but they were swiftly fixed!
• While Didier Raboud and Steve were performing some tests with the built images, I’ve prepared the announcement for dda@, and updated the usual pages in the debian-installer corner of the website: news entry, errata, and homepage.
• Once the website was rebuilt to include these changes, I’ve sent the announce, and lifted all block-udeb.

(On a related note, I’ve started tweeting rather regularly about my actions, wins & fails, using the #DebianInstaller hashtag. I might try and aggregate my tweets as @CyrilBrulebois into more regular blog posts, time permitting.)

Executive summary: D-I Stretch Alpha 1 is released, time to stretch a bit!

(Credit: rferran on openclipart)