Hi Paul,
Thanks for all the information.
On Apr 5, 2016 6:46 PM, "Paul Wise" <pabs@debian.org> wrote:
>
> On Tue, 2016-04-05 at 10:28 -0700, Steven Noble wrote:
>
> > Responses inline.
>
> How are you complying with the GPL here? For Debian, closed drivers can
> only be distributed by us as source code and the compilation happens on
> end-user systems using dkms, anything else would be a GPL violation.
I think I am saying things incorrectly as it appears that dkms is related to kernel modules which we do not ship in our releases.
To that point, end users are free to install whatever they would like, such as using code from projects like OpenNSL and ofdpa, which provide versions of their kernel modules on github.
For the non-gpl driver libraries, I have no right to distribute the source for those, only binaries.
>
> I'm not sure which archive tool you are using (as your census page
> doesn't contain that information) but most of the existing tools that
> are popular for creating Debian repositories will do the right thing.
>
> https://wiki.debian.org/HowToSetupADebianRepository
>
> The Debian apt repository format is mostly defined by the
> implementations but there is some documentation here:
>
> https://wiki.debian.org/RepositoryFormat
We have our own tool. I made some changes today to build Release files. I will continue to hack at it while I study the different tools available.
> Great, thanks. This is especially important for packages where you have
> modified the source code, as Debian systems will automatically generate
> patches from your source packages to present to Debian maintainers.
>
> http://deriv.debian.net/patches/
I don't modify any debian source code that I am aware of. I do use kernel patches, but those patches are pulled from companies like cumulus. I did put the sources for the binaries that I am redistributing in a sources directory but dpdk-scanpackage does not seem to like how I did it, so they are not showing up.
>
> > armel is very, very new (the main pull was yesterday) and has not
> > been announced yet. We have not pushed any packages to the repo yet,
> > but will do soon.
>
> I note that you wrote armv7 in the architectures list, but armel is
> armv4t IIRC. I think you should probably look at armhf instead:
>
> https://www.debian.org/ports/arm/
> https://wiki.debian.org/ArmHardFloatPort
Thanks for the pointer, I will look again, but my understanding is that the processor built into the broadcom soc is armel, ARMv7a.
>
> > I am looking into this, once I understand how to generate it I will
> > put it into the build system.
>
> IIRC it is simply a patch to base-files to put ONL information in
> /etc/dpkg/origins/opennetworklinux and change the default symlink.
Although I was unable to find any documentation saying so, It appears that the vendor string has to be a single word. We are using "Open Network Linux" in our .deb creation, which fails if we try to use it as a vendor string in origins. If this is the case, I will update our tool to use OpenNetworkLinux instead.