Re: Where to start hacking unstable on Alpha?
On 04/07/11 01:05, Gianluca Bonetti wrote:
> I would like to help somehow in the development of Debian on Alpha.
Nice! We need all the help we can get.
> 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.
We have had a number of offers for buildds, but only two people at the
moment are seriously working to get their machines into the debian-ports
autobuilder network. We are still working through a number of issues in
getting the buildds going.
If you are serious about adding your DS20 to the autobuilder network
then let me know.
> 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.
Might be better to dist-upgrade to snapshots.debian.org to the date of
roughly the squeeze release. Then upgrade (not dist-upgrade) to
debian-ports because the architecture "all" packages have been coming
through to the Alpha repository and cause a number of conflicts.
BTW, what kernel are you running on your Lenny system? A couple of us
tried to upgrade the kernel to the one in lenny-backports but it fails
to find the qlogic firmware that is, in fact, present in the correct
place in the initrd file.
> 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)
To go much further than that you will need some patches for binutils
(which fixes a test suite failure in eglibc and fixes the building of
C++ libraries including building of g++ in the gcc-4.4 and gcc-4.5
packages), and a patch for eglibc which fixes statfs64 (and friends)
which is probably the explanation for the problems you noted. Once you
have perl built there are a number of perl dependent packages that need
to be rebuilt against perl (I have a list of four so far).
> 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.
I am not seeing this problem. I have an unstable chroot running on a
PWS600au under Lenny and a unstable chroot running on a XP1000 under
Sid. All are updated to my repository which is a few hundred packages
ahead of debian-ports.
> 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
I suspect the eglibc patch is what you need.
> Did somebody experiment the same situation?
> How did you solve?
Noted above. I also have a patch for mesa to get gallium going if you
are running a Radeon card with KMS. It's quite cool :-) Oh, you will
need a patch for the kernel too (hopefully will be in the upcoming 3.0).
> How about the buildd daemons?
Bill and Witold are working on getting buildds going. I think Witold
hasn't had enough time to invest in it and Bill has hit some snags
setting up his buildd.
I have buildds running on my PWS600au and XP1000 (as noted above) but
they are not part of the debian-ports autobuilder network. I am running
them off my own wanna-build server so that I could continue to find some
of the problems that need fixing in the meantime.
> Are they running well with the same coreutils-8.5-1, or use another release?
Mine are.
> I will really like to help in the
> requalification path for Debian on Alpha.
Fantastic! The more people the better. This is far bigger than a
one-man or even a three-man job.
> About this path, I would like to ask...
> Is there some leadership or coordination between each single effort?
Not really. But I guess I have taken a little bit of a lead to get
things moving along since there seemed to be a lot of sheep without
shepherds.
> Is there an "open tasks list" somewhere?
No, but I am also thinking that this would be a good idea. I hadn't
really moved on it since getting the autobuilders going is the main
problem at present.
> Is the debian-alpha mailing list the only mean for sharing knowledge?
It is the primary means for debian alpha at present.
Anyone serious about helping with the Debian Alpha port revival should
also join linux-alpha@vger.kernel.org mailing list. (It's low volume.)
There is also a #alpha channel (for Alpha Linux) on the freenode IRC.
It's mainly populated by Gentoo people but there is a wealth of
knowledge there.
> 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
What's "CMS"?
> 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).
Sounds good! Having a project website (I presume that is what it is)
would be really good.
After getting the autobuilding network going the next most important
thing is getting gcc-4.6 compiled. It currently has a bootstrap
comparison failure. I posted about it in this forum a couple or so
weeks ago but unfortunately I didn't get any guidance on how to proceed
with debugging it.
Cheers
Michael.
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