Re: Some observations regardig the progress towards Debian 3.1
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).
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.
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.
Regards,
Karsten
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