Where to start hacking unstable on Alpha?
Hello Alpha-folks! :)
I would like to help somehow in the development of Debian on Alpha.
I managed to get one DS10 at home with 320GB harddisk, large enough to
handle many compilation tasks.
I will also bring up a DS20 very soon at my work place, to add a build machine.
By now, I did:
1) install Lenny as base OS
2) debootstrap another Lenny in /home/unstable
3) chroot to /home/unstable, add ftp.debian-ports.org to
/etc/apt/sources.list, and upgrade to unstable.
4) start building packages in Lenny, the install in Unstable, until I
get Unstable to build by itself (due to missing dependencies for
debhelper, I cannot do now)
The I started to look out what packages need work.
I see that many packages have to be built, starting from perl and all
the others needed to have debhelper working.
Life isn't easy in the Unstable chroot, worst of all, it seems that
coreutils are working bad, expecially 'rm'.
This is really bad situation, if coreutils don't work well, nothing
will grow up in health.
For example:
# cd /
# mkdir -p a/b
# du a
du: cannot access 'a/b': Function not implemented
# rm -rf a
rm: cannot remove 'a/b': Is a directory
Same operations with success in the Lenny environment.
Sharing the same running kernel in memory, same disk, same filesystem,
I suppose that unstable coreutils aren't alpha-safe.
I tried to recompile coreutils-8.5-1, but if fails one test, test-fstatat:
FAIL: test-fstatat (exit: 134)
test-stat.h:45: assertion failed
Did somebody experiment the same situation?
How did you solve?
How about the buildd daemons?
Are they running well with the same coreutils-8.5-1, or use another release?
So, I am stuck in Lenny for now for building packages, which gives me
some headaches with missing dependencies when installing in Unstable.
Please give some advice, I will really like to help in the
requalification path for Debian on Alpha.
About this path, I would like to ask...
Is there some leadership or coordination between each single effort?
Is there an "open tasks list" somewhere?
I am struggling with some problems, maybe others have already found a solution.
Is the debian-alpha mailing list the only mean for sharing knowledge?
If so, I have to say it is not the best solution, and we (I put myself
in the pack...) should head up to another solution.
I suggest a simple CMS based web site, say Drupal CMS with forum and
project handling modules to help developers in sharing their knowledge
and hacking efforts up to a positive result for everyone.
If such solution is already available somewhere, I apologize because I
haven't find by googling an hour.
Otherwise I offer myself to build such workplace site
I could do it in my spare time, in less than a week, and free of costs
(I will get my company to fund as needed).
Thanks everybody for reading up to this, and excuse me for bad english :)
Ciao
gl
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