Robert Garron wrote:
All I need is direction as to what to do, when to do (now), and who to contact (our growing list - but who in Debian land to contact). I do appreciate your provided list of contacts - I hope they all respond to our call to have Alpha Squeeze...
I want to thank you for starting this thread. I'm catching up a little bit, but I think you are asking about what would be required to recertify Alpha as a release architecture in Debian. Is that correct?
I do not know what would be involved in the recertification of Alpha as a release architecture for Debian. I'd be very interested to find out the answer.
I do not know who in Debian to contact regarding the status of official or semi-offical support for the Alpha architecture in Debian. Presumably, there is a forum within the Debian community for discussion of a port's health, viability, etc. The debian-alpha list was part of the discussion back in 2009 re: Squeeze, but I'm not sure what other forums were involved.
It may be useful to contact Steve Langasek, who was the Port Maintainter and a heavy lifter for the Lenny release on Alpha. He may be able to point us in the right direction for contacts.
FWIW, though, I don't think we're going to get far asking Debian leadership about a *Squeeze* release on Alpha. I think that ship sailed in 2009. Is that really what you meant? IMO, if there really is interest and resources that can be committed to official or semi-official support of Debian on Alpha, it would be better to look beyond Squeeze.
Anyway, What should our next steps be? What my group has to offer a Debian Alpha group is: Three (3) almost fully loaded working 4100's with HSC's and fully loaded bays.Five (5) 2100's and one (1) DS20 (older model, unfortunately the motherboard has an issue that has not been fixed yet - Joel's company can fix this -- we just have not done it yet) and another ~10 Alpha's of various sorts. The above are the real working units.Plan - I guess we need to finalize the list of people who can help, exchange contacts, setup systems to perform the work, and ask Debian if they can provided all of the past tools they have used to create a release... Maybe Debian can provide a CD with a HowTo to setup a distro creation environment? We can mount that so our new group can have full access. I guess we should also setup git or subversion for source code control etc... I am probably getting ahead of myself here as the group should decide how to proceed upon its formation...
I think these are good starting thoughts. I also have resources which I can contribute, if they are useful (http://www.alphalinux.org/wiki/index.php/User:Prescott is still about right).
I'll make a few notes/thoughts below that may be of some use.I never created installation media for my own build of Squeeze packages on alpha. It was on my list, but I haven't gotten around to figuring out the "Debian way" to do it (that was a goal of mine).
To build Debian packages for the alpha architecture - in the full-blown Debian way - a wanna-build server, buildd machine(s), and an apt repository will be needed. One or more humans will be needed to digitally sign the debian packages and review the logs of failed builds (and do something about them). When the human(s) sign the packages, they can be uploaded to the apt repository. In Debian-speak, I believe the humans in the above are referred to as "buildd-admins". Those humans would need to be identified.
The wanna-build server need not be an alpha, but the buildd machines would need to be (obviously).
Information regarding how to set up a wanna-build and buildd is on the net. FWIW, I tried to document the setup I used to build squeeze for alpha here:
http://www.ekkaia.net/~cpp/blog/?p=9After processing the enormous backlog of packages (14,000 or so, I think), I hovered around 97 or 98 percent of packages in the distro built and uploaded. There were always some which gave trouble, that I didn't care about (think mono-related packages and the like).
For the building of squeeze packages, I did not find the operation of the buildd machines to be terribly time consuming (at most I used three buildds - 2x CS20 and a UP1100, but I was starting from scratch and in no hurry). I usually signed and uploaded blobs of packages once or twice a day. On occasion I worked up patches or incorporated existing ones into Debian packages - but this was fairly rare, and mostly related to installation-media-only packages (and I never produced installation media). I'm sure the lack of problems I experienced was greatly helped by the alpha maintainers and Debian developers who kept the Alpha version of unstable going strong. For the buildd machines, I found it was better to have machines with drives larger than 9GB (system+chroot space) - I could get into trouble space-wise if I did not upload often enough.
As I understand, the Debian-speak for the role of the humans who kept the active versions of packages working on a particular architecture is "porter". I think it is not a problem for a "buildd-admin" and a "porter" can be the same human. But from Debian's perspective, I don't see how a one-man port can be viable long term.
For the apt repository, I used reprepro. IIRC, this is not what the official repositories use, though. But after living with it for a while, it seems very nice, and documentation is ubiquitous. There should be a backup for the apt repository. I used an md mirror for my main repository and backed it up to another machine (also with an md mirror). If uploading into official Debian repos, this is probably all taken care of, I'd guess(?). The size of my apt repository for alpha squeeze packages is about 30GB.
Cheers, Craig