Re: Where to start hacking unstable on Alpha?
2011/7/3 Michael Cree <mcree@orcon.net.nz>:
> 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.
Hello!
I am an Alpha enthusiast, so I will try to do something for the project.
I have one DS10 at home, where I am doing the most of my tests now.
I also have one DS20 (2x500) and a couple of 4100s (4x533 and 2x466)
in fully working condition, but I could only put one online at work,
and only part time (night time and weekends), so I don't know if it is
an option.
> 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.
I have tested this path when you suggested, but seems I get to the
same place, more or less.
Anyway, this is exactly what I mean for "knowledge sharing".
Your advice will help me, maybe others.
Information like this should be kept in an user friendly archive.
Google search helps as always, but putting more documentation in one
central place could help in this hard time.
> 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.
Well, by now I have Lenny on DS10, which features an ALI IDE
controller, very useful because I put a cheap 320GB drive inside two
weeks ago.
I have a spare Qlogic PCI board, I could try if need some test and
feedback (that's mainly why I am here).
BTW, I am running 2.6.26-2-alpha-generic (from Lenny) and 3.0.0-rc6
(compiled from ftp.kernel.org sources).
I have done some compilation task on kernel 3.0.0-rc5 and -rc6 and it
works rock solid, so it seems that at least kernel support for alpha
architecture is still in good shape.
> 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).
I don't have the skills to debug eglibc and produce patches by myself,
so I need these patches if really required.
>> 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.
Could you provide somewhere the .deb for coreutils you are using?
Even a .deb rebuilt with dpkg-repack would be good for me to test.
> 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).
Yeah, I have a Radeon 9200 inside the DS10 :)
I bought one of the last PCI ones when still available for my beloved Alpha!
>> 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.
I think that a bunch of isolated developers cannot do this work.
Every contribution, even the smallest one, could make the difference
when we come together.
>> 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"?
In web development speech, a CMS is a software engine that provides
interactive web pages out of database data and template pages.
A CMS for development purposes could be a specific one (as the ones on
sf.net or alioth.debian.org) or a generic CMS with development and
collaboration modules (like drupal with specific modules, or the
openatrium fork/extension).
>> 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.
I am already doing some tests on my own domain hosting with different
CMS solutions, I will let you know.
Anyway, choosen one, we could have it online in a day or so.
Maybe opening a project hosted on alioth.debian.org would be enough
for us for teamwork and code sharing, as it has forum, bug tracker,
mercurial repository.
I don't know if the development of the full Alpha port could be done
inside a single project on alioth, or if a separate hosting would be
better for our purposes.
> 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.
I am trying to catch up with the Unstable chroot, then I will see what
I can do for the project, but I suppose that I could mainly do testing
at the moment.
Ciao!
gl
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