Re: Debian-installer, older hardware, boot loaders, miboot & amiboot & ..

[Jeremie Koenig <sprite@sprite.fr.eu.org>]

On Sun, Mar 28, 2004 at 09:16:14AM +0200, Sven Luther wrote:
> The problematic file comes in a mac .sit format, is claimed to be GPL by
> the author, and include the source in the above mentioned .sit (no idea
> though, since i have no mac to look at them). There are various problems
> though :
> 
>   1) to build those files, not only a mac system is needed, but also an
>   older version of the code warrior compiler.

Yes, and it seems quite hard to circumvent. 

> => would mean contrib probably, but debian-installer is in main.

The plan was to request a sarge-ignore tag on the "d-i build-depends on
miboot, which is in contrib", and try to find a better solution for next
releases.

> Well, i, and the upstream author too, think that it should be possible
> to rewrite this small boot sector yourself. This would need good
> oldworld pmac knowledge, which i don't have. It seems only a small
> part of the 1K boot-sector is used. No idea what the source code of
> this would look like. Jeremie, if it came to that, since you seem to
> have some of the knowledge and the hardware, would you feel like
> investigating this ?

It sounds like something possible, however it'd be quite hard and I'm
not sure it'd be the most urgent thing.

I'd first make miBoot buildable with free tools, then write a boot
sector specifically targetted at it. Then we could have miBoot in main,
but not before. Still it'd be a big amount of work (I'm not such a
knowledgeable guy about oldworld, I never used such a machine before I
tried to make it boot d-i.)

> Do we have a response or a strategie for those cases, except the "give
> instructions for the user to build the stuff himself from various URLS",
> which was used, if i remember well, for miboot in boot-floppies.

No, miBoot and the said boot block used to sit around in the
boot-floppies source code, without any license or source code. I'd say
the legal situation will be improved much already !

Would it be really problematic to upload the boot block along with
miboot in contrib or non-free ?

-- 
Jeremie Koenig <sprite@sprite.fr.eu.org>