Re: Port status
Alex Holden <alex@linuxhacker.org> writes:
> Hi. I was just wondering what the actual current status of the debian-arm
> port is... I tried the bootable image last year, and it didn't seem very
> advanced compared to Titan. I occasionally looked at the web page to see
> if any progress was being made, but it appeared that the project had been
> abandoned because it never changed.
The web page hasn't been updated for eons. (my fault)
Tomorrow's my big Debian bugsquash day. Hopefully, I'll get time to
fix the page.
> A couple of months ago at Linux99, I was nabbed by one of the Debian
> developers who told me that the ARM port was in fact making great
> progress... I've just got around to looking at the FTP repository
> and it does appear that the Debian port is quite advanced now, even
> though the web page (and the status reported on it) is the same as
> it was months ago.
It's done OK, but we still need to get our autobuilder set up and I
don't think there's a hope in hell of getting everything the port
ready enough to ship with potato (the next release of Debian).
I've got quite a few non-ARM things I need to get fixed before the
code freeze for potato (which is in early November, I think) - so I
probably won't have any time to do any work on the ARM port for
several weeks. :-(
> Anyway, Titan VI is very close to being released now, and we (Zereau-
> http://www.zereau.com/) will probably be selling it on CD, both in source
> and ARMv4l binary form, and possibly in ARMv3l form too. I was just
> wondering whether there would be any point selling Debian-ARM CDs along
> with it or not. Is the port ready for this yet, and how much interest
> would there be in it?
I'm not sure if there is much point just yet, because nobody has
worked on the installation procedure and documentation yet (eg. add
ARM patches to boot-floppies).
I've never tried to use debian-cd, so I'm not sure if it needs extra
patches to make the CD images for ARM. I'm not sure if there's a
whole lot of value in shipping a CD full of the current .deb files
because most of them are already outdated.
The number of people using Debian-ARM right now is so tiny that there
probably won't be much of a market until there's a nice installation
routine (for the NetWinder and Acorn, I guess) and a stable release.
Thanks for the offer anyways. :-)
Cheers,
- Jim
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