On Fri, Mar 07, 2003 at 04:13:16PM +0100, Manuel Hoppe wrote:
> Hi!
>
> I read the port web pages of the NetBSD and FreeBSD but I'm confused
> anyway. ;-)
>
> Both ports are under heavy development. But the summaries presented on
> the web pages are not really clear how active. I miss changelog like
> summaries and test images like the Hurd. The boot floppies for NetBSD are
> from october, is someone working on new ones?
We've been sort of bad about keep the status page up to date, at least for
NetBSD. Should probably fix that. :)
Test install stuff is problematic, apart from the floppies (which I
believe are still up to date), though there is a pre-build chroot
available now which more or less works, for netbsd-i386 (see the
debian-bsd.lightbearer.com page).
> Don't missunderstand me, I'd like to help. So I would suggest to add/
> change the following things: - release test images with changelog
The main problem with doing this is that we don't yet have support for
debootstrap, or all of the Essential packages. It's getting better, and
closer, but we're not there quite yet.
> - automsg to the newsletter, with state-of-the-art infos on the
> current
> development and liks to the web page
Probably better for the two or three of us doing the "heavy lifting" of the
port to post this periodically. See below.
> - web page: to do list with open tasks (request for maintainer/ develper)
See previous, and below.
> I'm especially interested in the to do/ open tasks list, because I'd like
> to help but I have no clue where to start. I could e. g. help with the
> web pages or whatever. What's your opinion?
Probably good things to try to be better about. As part of that, here's a
list of things that are either on my TODO list, or seem significant and
were recently accomplished:
1) Stats are now posted to debian-gcc for each GCC build (3.2, 3.3, or 3.4)
as it gets done. Doing builds is still manual, however.
2) dpkg and APT, as of their next releases, should work without patching on
netbsd-i386.
3) jftw (Joel's FTW library), which provides an ftw() shim for APT, has
been uploaded and accepted into the archive. This package should eventually
be subsumed into NetBSD's libc (GNU libc already has ftw and nftw); ref. PR
libs/18378.
4) The netbsd-libc package (which produces libc12, and it's companions) is
more or less fully packaged, though it has a few bugs that are waiting on a
better GCC for the next upload.
5) TODO: Once upstream 1.6.1 is released, update the netbsd-libc package.
6) TODO: Fix GCC so that libc is linked implicitly on shared binaries and
libraries. Currently, this is causing libstdc++-v3 to fail it's testsuite
(and normal usage) in some very horrible ways; I'm trying to find a GCC
expert to help me track it down, since backtracing the cause indicates it's
deep in the internals.
7) The binary-netbsd-i386 package section has 72 entries, currently (though
many of them may need to be rebuilt once GCC is saner, to get a clean
Depends entry including libc).
--
Joel Baker <fenton@debian.org>
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