Re: nwutil status
+++ Adam C Powell IV [05-11-18 15:41 -0500]:
> On Fri, 2005-11-18 at 13:49 -0500, Woody Suwalski wrote:
> > Adam C Powell IV wrote:
> > > On Thu, 2005-11-17 at 17:29 -0500, Ralph Siemsen wrote:
> > >> Adam C Powell IV wrote:
> > >>
> > >>> Oh no, that's not good! I guess the "less than a hundred users" doesn't
> > >>> take into account that there are only nine arm users registered with
> > >>> popcon at all (why's that? there are more than nine of us on this
> > >>> list... then again, it was six until a couple of weeks ago), and a
> > >>> subset of those are Netwinders running nwutil.
Debian-arm is currently being considered as to whether it should remain a
debian stable architecture (i.e one that is in sync with the others, has
security updates, etc). There is a thread about this last month on this list.
If you are a user of debian-arm (especially stable), and need this
functionality (as opposed to snapshots of testing which you support yourself
or rely on the testing-security team), then you need to make sure Debian
knows you exist. That means running popcon and adding yourself to
http://wiki.debian.org/armEtchReleaseRecertification
It is not clear yet whether arm will make it into the next stable release or
not - we are near the cut-off point.
> > I have today created nwutil-1.5 package with all the patches, wish
> > lists, updates and bug fixes + mine own fixes and additions.
> >
> > Now how to upload it to the repository????
>
> I take it then that you're not a Debian maintainer? Then you can't be
> the package maintainer, unless someone sponsors you to become a Debian
> maintainer...
He can, so long as he has a mentor. I'm pleased to see both woody and ralph
working on sorting this out. Like a lot of things in the arm port it would
have been done some time ago if people had noticed. I'm happy to sponsor
uploads of this if necessary, effectively maintained by one or both of those
two, as I have a netwinder to test it on. Adam could probably do it too?
> > Who may be able to accept anything if Phil and James are on the quiet
> > side???
> >
> > Basically: is the Debian ARM section still administered by somebody or
> > just a museum?
Phil used to do a lot of the debian-arm work, but for various reasons has
been doing less of it, but most of us didn't notice for quite some time that
our port was increasingly unmaintained. We have a big backlog of packages
that don't build as a result: see http://wiki.debian.org/ArmBuilddWatch for
current issues and
http://buildd.debian.org/~jeroen/status/architecture.php?a=arm
for today's status.
James does his bit (maintaining buildds, requeing things, and signing
packages for upload) (and Vince has been doing a fine job of looking after
kernels, d-i and infrastructure). The rest of us need to fix broken stuff.
We now understand that we have a problem, and broadly
what they are, but there is no substitute for people spending time fixing
things.
> It's still pretty active, a lot of us use it and contribute bug reports,
> fixes, etc. The big endian contributions have been the most visible
> form of this recently.
Indeed. It looks like armeb is already more active than arm. Fortunately we
have most of our bugs in common, so activity on either port helps both.
It's very hard to tell if armeb is really bigger than arm. I doubt it, but
it may become so.
> And there isn't an "ARM section" separate from the main repository, we
> upload into, autobuild packages from/for, and download from the same
> mirror system as the other arches. Except armeb...
Indeed, but that will change if we get dropped from the set of stable
arches, so everyone who cares needs to make sure that packages build. Please
look at the list of current failures and files bugs or patches, or update
the wiki to clarify/classify issues there are still ~175 packages that are
broken, and we are still (just) below the magic 95% TPTB have decreed is required.
(One problem with this figure is that (so far as I can tell) packages which
are not intended to build on arm, still count against us (they certainly
appear in the build stats as 'maybe-failed'). It would be useful to check if
this is the case or not, as a quick grep suggests that 297 should not be
built, and that's just over 3% of the auto-built archive (9565 packages(?)),
which means we are actually at ~97% not 94.5%.)
And of course rescuing neglected packages like nwutil is useful too.
Wookey
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