Re: Some observations regardig the progress towards Debian 3.1
Karsten Merker <karsten@excalibur.cologne.de> writes:
> On Sat, Nov 15, 2003 at 07:15:42PM +0100, Goswin von Brederlow wrote:
>
> > The problems with porting debian-installer to different archs is
> > minimal. As shown on the D-I debcamp in Oldenburg porting to a new
> > architecture can be done over a weekend without any prior knowledge of
> > d-i. Since then several things have also been simplified in respect to
> > porting and more people are able to help on the issue.
> >
> > Given a person with the hardware and time I'm certain support can be
> > added in a single day. The big problem is getting access to the
> > hardware directly or indirectly through a tester.
>
> Unfortunately it is not that simple. Work is underway for several
> architectures, but this takes a lot longer than just a single day or
> a weekend. Don't forget that besides platform-specific bugs in d-i
> (like the crash when selecting another language than US-English on
> mipsel) there are also platform-specific bugs which are probably not
> a problem of d-i itself but show up only in d-i (the busybox-ash
> problem on mipsel comes to my mind).
Ok, but those will only show up once a port is underway.
I was talking about getting d-i build and make it create bootable
images. Testing of the many subcomponents (all the udebs) takes a lot
longer and a lot more testers.
> Besides that there are architectures which cannot dynamically load
> a ramdisk through the bootloader but instead must statically
> compile the initrd into the kernel, which needs a kernel rebuild
> for every new cycle, so turnaround times are quite long.
Thats being worked on for ppc for some time now, which seems to be the
worst case needing a complete kernel compile to add the initrd. Other
archs can link a prebuild image and initrd or use the ppc method once
thats setteled.
> Making a "normal" change and testing it takes up to an hour for me;
> if I need to do a full install to test the change (like the current
> work on the bootloader stuff) takes even longer.
>
> Nonetheless I do not think that there should be an i386-only release
> of d-i. One of Debian's strengths is the multi-platform support,
> and we should try to keep d-i in sync on all platforms.
One aim for my mail was to rouse some people to help for the other
archs.
MfG
Goswin
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