On Mon, Oct 21, 2002 at 06:00:34PM +0100, John Ineson wrote: > I have a Sun IPC here that is running NetBSD and yearning for some good > Debian lovin'. I know that other people have expressed an interest in > extending the port to Sparc, so where do we start? Matthew -- did you > ever write those notes you mentioned last month?
Astonishingly, I did. I was on a train somewhere around Sheffield at the time, so they were mostly done from memory. On the plus side, they should give you some idea of how to get started. Joel's been working on getting patches into unstable, so you're best off working from there. #debian-bsd on Open Projects (or whatever they're called this week) is probably a good place to ask questions as you go along. Oh, and mentions of patch locations aren't ideal now. Joel's got rather a lot of cleaner ones in his CVS tree, so you're better off using those. Anyway, here we are: 1) Install GNU utilities. Various bits of the build process rely upon them. You'll probably want at least fileutils, textutils, flex and bison. 2) Compile dpkg. Add an entry to archtable in order to get it to build happily - this should be your GNU config triple followed by your Debian architecture (so probably netbsd-sparc for the sparc port). You also want to modify dpkg-architecture (it's in the scripts directory, IIRC) in much the same way. dpkg is likely to complain about being unable to determine the architecture from the gcc library location - ignore this for now. 3) Once you have dpkg development tools, start building the rest of build-essential. Various patches should be available from http://www.srcf.ucam.org/debian-netbsd/ - post to the list regarding anything that you can't build and which doesn't have a patch there. It may be that it requires another package building first. Note that you'll have to do things like hack the debian/control file to deal with non-building documentation and so on. Debian isn't buildable from source at the moment - there are circular build depends. Don't worry about packages that don't have complete functionality at the moment. With what you have you'll be able to get further. 4) The easiest way to do things is to have a separate partition to install your Debian stuff into - that way you can chroot into it to test things without risking damaging your original install, and eventually you'll be able to use that as your root filesystem instead of your original one. 5) Note that while you're doing this, unless you're using -current, NetBSD's gcc will be building binaries that will look for their dynamic linker in /usr/libexec. In this case, you'll need to rebuild all of these packages later on to look in /lib. 6) Various native packages can be found in http://www.srcf.ucam.org/debian-netbsd/source - it would be interesting to know if I've managed to build these in such a way that they'll compile on non-i386. They're mostly based heavily on the NetBSD source, so can in most cases probably be fixed just by copying stuff out of the NetBSD source tree. -- Matthew Garrett | [EMAIL PROTECTED]
