"State of the art"
I'm sorry I've been so quite lately. I've been quite busy, a little
sick, and, until yesterday, unable to find enough space to recompile X
and other things. :-) That has changed, and I intend to push forward
again.
Anyway, I wanted to comment on what I perceive the state of things to
be WRT Debian/Alpha, and maybe I can suggest a couple of activities
for people.
We've got a fair number of packages compiled---nowhere even remotely
near all, but many of the "basic" ones. Pasi has done us a wonderful
service by creating installation disks, however many glitches they
might have.
Unfortunately, some of the packages have problems, including:
Because the old method of bootstrapping stuff often left old libs
around, which then would get linked to new packages, etc. I know
off-hand that this affects sudo, and probably others.
There are packages where there is simply no way to work from the
existing debian package because the alpha mods to it would have been
too extensive, and were often not conditionalized (no #ifdef's). This
includes libg++ (which might be mergeable with the version recently
released for libc6 use) and probably others.
I've not felt comfortable about releasing these to the archive, since
they're basically non-reproducible, so I've been putting them on
debian.med.miami.edu. A note, though: I've not cleaned
debian.med.miami.edu:/pub/mdorman in a while. If you find something
on the main archive that's also on debian.med.miami.edu, use the one
on the main archive---it's probably been left on debian.med.miami.edu
by mistake.
Finally, some packages, though they compile fine, don't work entirely
properly. A big one here is telnet---FWIW, if you telnet to a
specific IP address it'll work. I don't know why hostname resolution
confuses it so.
I would like it if some people could scan the archive, figuring out
which packages might still be linked with the old libc6, and either
recompile them (and _check_ them, too, by hand, just to be sure), or
post to the list and let someone else do them (which means that you
can help even if you don't have a working system yet).
Also, if people could really give packages a workout, and if someone
could maintain a debian/alpha status page, with a list of known
issues, like the telnet bug, on the WWW, so we can remember to look at
these, but reassure people that things are getting better at the same
time.
Anything else?
Mike.
--
TO UNSUBSCRIBE FROM THIS MAILING LIST: e-mail the word "unsubscribe" to
debian-alpha-request@lists.debian.org .
Trouble? e-mail to templin@bucknell.edu .
Reply to: