Re: ARM port, auto-recompilation, and binary-only revision bumps

[Jim Pick <jim@jimpick.com>]

Bdale Garbee <bdale@gag.com> writes:

> In article <19990107160215.E4008@debian.org> you wrote:
> 
> : Maybe we could work with the FTP site maintainer to just replace the
> : whole lot of packages when the time comes, or something like that
> : (human intervention).  The old packages will be useless anyway..
> 
> I did exactly that with the binary-alpha tree at one point, when we
> had a similar "flag event" early in the life of the port.  It
> worked.  It really didn't feel right, since the folks running the
> port at that point had to do some manual things to update, since
> dselect/dpkg weren't helpful with the revisions being the
> same... but the number of folks running the port was small and it
> was *much* less work than any of the alternatives.  And frankly,
> most folks took the oportunity to do something akin to a reinstall
> from scratch after the flag event to make sure all the crufty old
> bits were gone.  Isn't porting fun?  :-)
> 
> Jim, I'm pretty sure I still have write access to the necessary
> parts of the tree.  As part of the debian-arm development community,
> I'd be happy to help orchestrate the shuffle when the time comes.  I
> doubt anyone not currently running debian-arm cares how we handle
> this if we do it in a way that's invisible to the other ports...

Ok, that sounds like a plan.

As long as everything compiles using the non-versioned libc, I
shouldn't have any problems batch recompiling everything to use
versioning.

Here's the gameplan:

 1. Finish egcs and test it
 2. Update all the packages we have to the latest versions.  There are
    still some old packages on ftp.jimpick.com (ie. dpkg, perl) that
    have to be rebuilt and uploaded to master.  Many current packages
    need to be patched to use the new arm architecture strings -
    particularily packages that build libraries.
 3. I'll figure out some way of bootstrapping the new stuff (perhaps
    I'll use the "Titan" RPMs)
 4. Then I'll try recompiling the base stuff with versioning, probably
    using the tools from the wanna-build package.  I'll temporarily
    store the packages on my server.
 5. I'll make a disk image.
 6. We'll install the new image on Alan DeKok's NetWinder.  We'll need an
    ssh package.
 7. Finish off recompiling the rest of the versioned .debs.
 8. Finally, we'll remove all the old ARM debs on master.debian.org,
    and replace them with the new ones.

Cheers,

 - Jim