Re: debian/m68k's future
On Fri, Apr 10, 2009 at 05:03:18PM -0500, Stephen R Marenka wrote:
> That's right, our old etch-m68k dpkg doesn't support Breaks.
> The options I can think of are.
> Option 1: backport dpkg to etch-m68k
> Yuck. etch-m68k is old and likely insecure. Who knows what
> back-porting dpkg would look like.
> Option 2: lenny-lite
> Build lenny with base, build-essential, and buildd-required
> packages. I can probably do this one myself if there's
> interest. I'll probably include anything required for d-i
> too.
I would favor that one, because...
> Option 3: lenny
> Go ahead and try to do a lenny release. I think we have
> nearly all the binary packages, but how to shove them into
> an archive intelligently? I'm willing to help if anyone
> knows how and can direct or is otherwise willing to lead.
... this is too much work. IMHO we should downsize *-m68k to fewer packages.
This would make sense for the buildds and the porters work. Less packages,
less bugs to care about, more time to care about more serious bugs for more
important packages.
Maybe we should concentrate on <2000 packages instead of >6000? Yes, it's
difficult to select which packages should be included, but having at least
2000 packages in fairly good and usuable shape will be better for the users
than having a dying 6000+ packages port in a bad shape, IMHO.
And I believe chances are better for re-joining Debian when we don't try to
follow the archive with all 6000+ packages. We could ask popcon which
are the most used packages on m68k for a first start...
> Option 4: throw in the towel
> Say it's time to retire m68k on debian. We have an ancient
> glibc with borked threads. gcc-4.3 is fairly broken. A
> number of packages need some bugs fixed, others need some
> porting. Not so many helpers these days. Funny thing is with
> aranym we have plenty of horsepower (although we need to fix
> the fpu emulation) and with d-ports our buildds won't get
> locked out of wanna-build. Kernel's probably in the best
> shape it's been in a long time.
I've been thinking about this option silently myself for several weeks now.
Although there is new interest in the port lately (several people asking how
to install Debian on m68k in the last weeks/months), I do believe that we
are not able to join back Debian again. Too much work and too few porters.
Stephen, you're doing great work, really! But like you say yourself, there
is much broken and no solution in sight.
I'm willing to continue my support for m68k with continuing running my m68k
hardware and to host a m68k mirror if there's need for it. If it helps, I
could sysadmin some machines (not buildd admin) to free some workload from
fellow porters.
--
Ciao... // Fon: 0381-2744150
Ingo \X/ http://blog.windfluechter.net
gpg pubkey: http://www.juergensmann.de/ij_public_key.asc
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