Hello! On 12/19/21 19:54, Johannes Brakensiek wrote: > Sorry, that's my bad. Did not know only certain images are supposed to > work.
In order to avoid this confusion in the future, let me briefly explain the situation. Both debian-installer, i.e. the application installing Debian, and the installation images are assembled from a large number of individual packages. In order to support a new platform, one needs to add support for this platform to a number of different packages, both in debian-installer and d-i packages as well as a number of other packages. For debian-installer to work with PowerMacs, quite a number of changes were necessary due to the complicated boot mechanism that these machines use. The packages that needed to be changed or created, are: - grub-installer - partman-hfs (new package) - grub2 - debian-cd - debian-installer - hfsprogs While the changes in debian-installer, grub2 and debian-cd have been implemented for a long time, the changes to grub-installer, hfsprogs and the new package partman-hfs were long incomplete and I often just used crude hacks to get the installation working. None of these crude hacks were naturally ever committed to the source code meaning that only a certain number of installation images that included these hacks were more or less working. I eventually started working on making the necessary changes to grub-installer and hfsprogs in a proper way and adding a new proper partman-hfs package. First of all, hfsprogs was unmaintained in Debian for a long time and due the way the package is maintained upstream by Apple - as part of a large source code dump - it was rather challenging to get hfsprogs updated to a newer upstream version. The source cannot be built as is on Linux but needs customization. Furthermore, Apple quietly removed support for legacy HFS which I had to restore as well when updating the package. Then I worked on grub-installer to get support added for GRUB installation on PowerMacs using hfsprogs and partman-hfs. I took me around three days with lots of testing and trial and error until I got the changes right that needed to be made for grub-installer. A quite long and nerve-wrecking process given the fact that you need to re-install Debian several times a day on a machine with a 1 GHz CPU. After I got it all ironed out, I committed the changes to grub-installer. Then hfsprogs needed to be changed again to add a hfsprogs-udeb package so that mkhfs and mkhfsplus were available inside debian-installer. The changes did not take long to implement, but the package was stuck in the Debian FTP NEW queue for almost a year. So, again for this change to be used, I had to resort to temporary hacks. This is further complicated by the fact that hfsprogs uses the APSL license which Debian currently considers to be non-free meaning that hfsprogs had to be moved to the "non-free" section which Debian Ports currently does not support. Last but not least, the partman-hfs udeb package is currently not part of the official Debian distribution as I have not continued with the work while the updated hfsprogs package was still in the NEW queue. I wasn't sure whether hfsprogs would still be accepted after such a long time, so I decided to rather wait with partman-hfs. The current situation is now that partman-hfs needs to be worked on next and Debian Ports needs to get support for the "contrib" and "non-free" distributions. The former is relatively easy and since I already have a rough draft package, it won't take me too long to get a proper partman-hfs package ready. However, getting support for "contrib" and "non-free" added to Debian Ports is not trivial and also outside my influence. I have been told by the Debian Ports FTP admins that there has been done some work to get this implemented, but I have unfortunately no time estimate when this will have been finally implemented. Until that has happened, please stick to the images that are known to work or wait until I release new images with the missing temporary hacks implemented and which I am declaring as "supposed to work" or "known to work". FWIW, since I also create images for other architectures, I'm trying to create new images regularly. But I cannot always take care of the manual changes required for Apple PowerMac which is why even newer images might not work. Adrian -- .''`. John Paul Adrian Glaubitz : :' : Debian Developer - glaub...@debian.org `. `' Freie Universitaet Berlin - glaub...@physik.fu-berlin.de `- GPG: 62FF 8A75 84E0 2956 9546 0006 7426 3B37 F5B5 F913
