As a preparation for the amd64 porters irc meeting tomorrow, I tried to build the complete Debian sarge archive for the amd64 architecture from the unpatched Debian sarge sources.
It took about a week to build all 8800+ source packages on a standard single processor EM64T-P4 box (Every package was built in a newly created clean chroot environment. By relaxing this requirement, the build time for the archive could probably be reduced to less than four days.) The result was very encouraging. Almost all packages build now on amd64 without problems using the pristine Debian sarge sources. There are very few remaining cases where a patch has been submitted to the BTS a long time ago and for some reason that patch has not yet been applied. These cases could either be solved by a porting NMU or by just dropping that package from the amd64 version of sarge. For some reason, the amd64 architecture has not been added to the official Debian archive. There is a plan to change this when sarge is released, but as I understand it, there is no plan to provide amd64 binaries for sarge in the official Debian archive. This means that Debian sarge will be released with source packages that can be used to build a complete and fully usable Debian sarge distribution for the amd64 architecture, but there will be no binaries available in the main Debian archive. This is not necessarily as bad as it may look at a first glance. First of all, everybody can build its own Debian amd64 sarge archive from the official Debian sarge sources. It will take only a few days to build the complete archive on cheap commodity hardware. This archive build process, including later updates, can easily be automated by a small script. To build packages from sources instead of downloading binary packages from a Debian archive may be a good idea from a security point of view. For critical applications it seems to be problematic to trust a binary archive which depends on the integrity of the machines of 1000 Debian developers. But of course, there _is_ a binary Debian amd64 sarge archive. The debian-pure64 amd64 archive on alioth is maintained by members of the amd64 porting team. It tracks the current Debian 'unstable' and 'testing' distributions. In the current situation, the amd64 porting team is responsible for providing and maintaining the amd64 binary archive and the amd64 buildd infrastructure, while the sources are taken from the normal Debian source archive. I consider this a good way to split up responsibilities. This way of handling things could serve as a good example of how other ports may be organized after sarge is released. As a conclusion, I think that it may still be possible to release the amd64 port with sarge. Nothing in the current setup has to be changed for that. It is just a matter of recognizing the current state of affairs officially. It will only be necessary to describe the current situation in the official release documents and include pointers to the separate amd64 archive, which will be provided by the amd64 porting team anyway. Regards Andreas Jochens P.S.: The above statements represent my personal view only. Other members of the amd64 porting team may view things differently, of course. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
