trixie candidate release architecture criteria

This is the canonical list of criteria for an architecture to be considered as a candidate release architecture. This only affects architectures already in unstable; the criteria for an architecture to be considered for unstable are set by the ftp-masters and are not covered by this document. Text marked in italic is considered as additional explanations and for border-line cases.

Note that this document lists general requirements, which are mostly independent of the actual release. The release team may also have other requirements for a given release (like what default compiler is used). Those "per-release" requirements are instead communicated to the porters via the debian-ports@lists.d.o alias.

Exceptions for individual points on this list may be given to an existing architecture by the release team if justification is provided.

In essence, these requirements exist to ensure that the port is in good enough shape and sufficiently well-supported that

• our users will benefit from the architecture's presence in a release,
• the architecture will give our users the same support and stability as any other architecture in the stable release,
• the architecture's inclusion doesn't negatively impact other architectures or the release process as a whole.

These criteria are:

• Availability: The architecture needs to be available for everybody, i.e. it must be available without NDAs and it must be possible to buy machines on the market.
  

  There will be some time while an architecture goes to end-of-life where it will not be easily buyable anymore at the market, but it is still useful for Debian's users if we continue support. This criterion doesn't mean it should be directly dropped, but there will be also a time where Debian and the port's porters can't really support the architecture anymore, and it reaches its natural end-of-life. (In other words, we are stricter with adding a new architecture, than at determing whether to keep an existing architecture.)

• Developers availability: The architecture must have a developer-available (i.e. debian.org) machine that contains the usual development chroots (at least stable, testing, unstable).
  
  
• Users: The architecture needs to prove that developers and users are actually using it. Five Developers need to certify in that they're actively developing on this architecture, and it needs to be demonstrated that at least 50 users are using the platform.

  We are counting users for the second criteria, not machines; e.g., one s390-installation with 50,000 users fullfils the user criterion just fine.

• Installer: The architecture must have a working, tested installer.
  
  
• Porters and Upstream support: There is support by the porters and upstream. This is especially true for the toolchain and the kernel.

  This criterion doesn't forbid that Debian's and upstream's support is handled by the same persons.

• Archive coverage: The architecture needs to have successfully compiled the current version of the overwhelming part of the archive, excluding architecture-specific packages.

  Our back-of-the-envelope number is 98% of the archive. We don't have a good way to measure an architecture's compliance with this yet, but we'll work on figuring that out; of course we will exclude hardware-specific packages and buggy packages with severe portability issues in optional/extra packages, but porters must take responsibility for working with maintainers to fix portability issues.

• Archive cleanliness: All binary packages need to be built from unmodified sources (i.e. from the source found in the ftp archive), and all binary packages need to be built by Debian buildds.

  That's just what's always true. Here only for completeness.

• Autobuilder support: The architecture is able to keep up with unstable with not more than two buildds, has redundancy in the autobuilder network, keeps their autobuilders running for 24x7, has autobuilders acceptable (read: fast enough) for security support. Autobuilders must use autosigning (exception for newly bootstrapped architectures) and throw-away chroots.
  

  We need of course autobuilders, and they need to be able to keep up.

  Redundancy is necessary just in case some buildd has hardware failures or whatever else. History told the release team that redundancy is really necessary. No-one in the release team wants again to track where a box in europe is just located, and prod some developer in that country to pick the box up, because that was once the largest blocker of a stable release.

  Of course, autobuilders can have hardware maintenance. But the autobuilers need to be able to run 24x7, and the need to be generally up all the time (and thanks to the redundancy above, there should always be an autobuilder currently running).

• Veto powers: Security team, system administrators and (stable) release team must not veto inclusion.

The release team will give any port multiple warnings with verbose explanaition, if the ports starts to fail any of these criteria, before taking any action.