On Wed, Mar 29, 2006 at 02:04:58AM +0200, Frans Pop wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> Sven Luther has recently announced [1] that he will no longer work on
> PowerPC support in Debian Installer.
>
> Colin Watson has already taken over the daily building of d-i images for
> PowerPC, so working daily builds are available again. Colin is willing to
> do that long term, but if a new porter should like to take care of that,
> I'm sure this can be discussed.
>
>
> So what does being a d-i porter involve?
> Mainly it means taking responsibility for architecture specific issues.
> Ideally this means:
> - regular testing of the installer, preferably on different subarches
> - keeping an eye out for installation reports for powerpc and following up
> on them (especially if architecture specific issues are reported)
> - taking care of architecture specific components of the installer, such
> as kernel udebs, bootloader installers, some partman components
> - reproducing, tracing and (hopefully) resolving bugs
> - taking care of daily builds of d-i images
Current open issues that i am aware of are :
- partman-prep is broken on IBM/CHRP and PREP and doesn't mark the partition
as prep and doesn't pass the partition number to prep-installer or
yaboot-installer, making debian uninstallable without major hurdle on prep
and IBM RS6k and pseries machines.
- d-i kernel .udebs need to add support for apus kernels. This was not
possible pre-beta2, due to changes being needed in kernel-wedge, and these
changes being too hazardous to do shortly before the etch beta2.
- nubus support. There is a working 2.4.27 nubus kernel, which needs to get
d-i support in order to be usefull for installing on nubus machines.
Ideally, the nubus patches should be ported to 2.6.x, but that is another
category of work required.
- each kernel abi change needs a reupload of the powerpc d-i kernels, and a
rechecking of all the modules for a new version. This is a tedious
process.
- debian-installer CDs don't boot on ibm rs6k 32bit machines.
yaboot-installer has a problem on those, and the mkvmlinuz generated
kernels with builtin initrd can also not boot (probably due to too huge
ramdisk thansk to initramfs-tools).
- various old-world issues, including the work to free miboot, and inclusion
of the free miboot version into the official archive. Mmm, i hope Colin
Watson doesn't forget to add miboot support to his daily builds, or
oldworld support will have been definitively killed.
- the graphical installer doesn't work anymore on powerpc, the graphical
frontend crashes, some heavy debugging is needed here.
Well, that is what i see right now, some of these issues are open since a
couple of weeks now, if not more, and i saw nobody jump in to fix then, even
after i was scheduled for expulsion, so i hope that frans calls will give more
results, altough seeing as it is a tedious process with little respect from
the d-i team ...
Friendly,
Sven Luther
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