Debian/Alpha suggestions
On Tue, 22 Sep 1998, Michele Comitini wrote:
>
> On 21-Sep-98 Christopher C Chimelis wrote:
> >
> > On Mon, 21 Sep 1998, Paul Slootman wrote:
> >
> >> Apparently the freeze for slink is about 4 weeks away, and it would be
> >> cool if Debian/Alpha makes it this time!
> >
> > I agree. I think we can do it this time around. Any major problems need
> > to be addressed soon, though, since I think slink's freeze time will be
> > considerably shorter than hamm's was.
> >
>
> The biggest problems I see are:
>
> - XF86_SVGA server locking the whole system with Millenium cards.
I just finished installing debian-alpha on my 533MHz LX164 system, and did
not see this problem (I have a Matrox Millenium II).
> - egcs has still some problems.
> - Stable kernels need some patching (alpha-patches).
> - If I need the HiSax more patching.
> - Ipfwadm does not work out of the box.
Biggest problems I saw were dependencies (I did an ftp install from
ftp.debian.org). There are multiple copies of many packages, many packages
are named in goofy ways (often with version numbers as part of the name,
which seems to destroy dependencies). console-tools is screwed...it didn't
seem to install properly, and caused other packages to not install properly
because the libraries libcfont, libconsole, libctutils (all .so) were
missing. Likewise with lesstif (for some reason some packages were looking
for lesstifg as a dependency -- ddd for example).
As I have time I will generate more specific bug reports for the
maintainers. I didn't write down *every* error message I came by (besides,
they scrolled by so *fast!* ;)
Here are a list of dependencies required by various packages that were not
found anywhere on the ftp.debian.org archive:
jdk1.1, pgp, gnupg, festival, guile, lesstifg.
In general, it seems a horrible idea to make versions part of the names of
packages. Some are named things like jdk1.1, and some even worse, like
blah3.4-08-23-1998. It seems to me that dates as part of the package names
also destroys dependencies.
Another problem I had was that there was little checking of available disk
space. The first time I installed on to a 2 gig partition, and filled it up
in the course of the install. The second time I used a 8 gig partition, and
was more conservative in my package selection... ;)
Perhaps the XSuSE server might be distributed with debian-alpha for those of
us using things like Matrox cards?
-- Bob
./'^`\._./'~`\._./'~`\._./'~`\._./'#`\._./'~`\._./'~`\._./'~`\._./'^`\.
/ Rube Goldberg? Bah! Amateur! I give you..Windows 98! Linux everywhere \
| Linux, because everyone's work is mission critical. ANYTHING inside. |
|_Bob McElrath (mcelrath@wisconsin.cern.ch) Univ. of Wisconsin at Madison_|
\.___________________________________________________________________./
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