call for volunteers -- woody boot-floppies
I am in need of volunteers -- people who know makefile and have worked
with boot-floppies before.
You may have heard about the debian-installer effort -- it's true.
Boot-floppies is end-of-life and will eventually be taken out and
shot. Hooray. No one will be happier than I.
OTOH, we do want to freeze woody prior to July, so we're going to need
to hobble along with boot-floppies for one more release -- woody.
Unfortunately, a lot of the "talent" have been sucked into
debian-installer. I have pretty much no one helping me right now with
boot-floppies maintenance.
Fortunately, I don't have to worry about including a bunch of fat new
features. Its more of a taking away operation, woody boot-floppies
is, than an adding features operation. But there's tons of work to be
done:
- fold out mklib.sh (library reduction) into it's own package
Marcus Brinkmann promised to do this
- mklib.sh is actually totally broken right now, all arches, with
- integrate AJ's dynamic base building package
/usr/bin/ld: /tmp/,mklibs.2558/lib-so: undefined versioned symbol
name fegetexceptflag@GLIBC_2.1
- eliminate all "configure the base system" steps -- they should be
handled, ideally, be debconf stuff run devolved into the right
packages
- eliminate hacked libraries -- we've removed hacked newt, slang,
and libutf8, but we need to be sure that the packaged versions meet
our needs -- or file RC bugs and hopefully patches against those
bugs if not
- i18n -- we were *heartbreakingly* close to this in woody, but the
effort from the i18n team just seemed to fizzle out
- eliminate the top-level Makefile ickyness -- I'm working on this
now, I've broken up that makefile and I'm replacing all those hacked
out rules with wildcard rules and such -- requires a bit of makefile
wizardy but the 8-fold reduction in makefile size is worth it
- hppa, ia64, and other porting
- pci auto-detection, work with in with modconf ?
Please help me out. Otherwise, god knows when we'll be able to
release woody!
I forgot in my last message to include the info on getting the
stuff from CVS. That's included below.
Followups to debian-boot@lists.debian.org, please. I don't read
debian-devel.
--
.....Adam Di Carlo....adam@onShore.com.....<URL:http://www.onShore.com/>
CVS and boot-floppies Sources
=============================
You can access the boot-floppies using CVS; this is particularly
useful if you are actively working on the package.
CVS comes with excellent documentation; in particular, see the `cvs'
info pages, and "Open Source Development with CVS", a GPL book freely
available online, at <URL:http://cvsbook.red-bean.com/>. (There is a
Debian package of it, called "cvsbook".)
There are various ways to access the CVS repository for boot-floppies,
depending on your circumstances. However, once you've set up your
CVSROOT variable properly, all the access methods behave almost much
identically.
There is a web interface for CVS, which is great for browsing the commit
logs, pulling diffs from the repository, and getting a good look at
the layout of the module. It can be accessed via:
<URL:http://cvs.debian.org/>.
* Getting the boot-floppies source via CVS
This version of the sources is for Debian 2.2, aka Potato.
The following are POSIX bourne shell commands you can run to get the
CVS area; other shell users should be able to translate to their shell
language easily. Commands with a `#' are comments; you don't have to
type those.
# If you are logged into to cvs.debian.org (CNAME va.debian.org):
export CVSROOT=/cvs/debian-boot
# If you are using `ssh' to access the area, and you have an
# account on cvs.debian.org -- this is the recommended method:
export CVS_RSH=ssh
export CVSROOT=:ext:<MY-USERNAME>@cvs.debian.org:/cvs/debian-boot
# If you are using anonymous (readonly) access:
export CVSROOT=:pserver:anonymous@cvs.debian.org:/cvs/debian-boot
cvs login
# You will be prompted for a password -- just hit `Enter'.
# If you are using a pserver account (i.e., you need write access
# but do not have a login account, and you have been given a
# pserver username and password):
export CVSROOT=:pserver:<USERNAME>@cvs.debian.org:/cvs/debian-boot
cvs login
# Enter the password you have been given.
After that, all techniques are the same. Simply check out the
sources. For the lastest Potato version, do:
cvs co boot-floppies
* Working on Woody
If you are working on the woody boot-floppies, you presently need to
use the 'woody' branch:
cvs co -r woody boot-floppies
If you want to change an existing checked out area to woody, in the
checked out source directory, do
cvs up -r woody
>From there, you can use `cvs update -d -P' (the '-d -P'is to get new
directories, and prune empty directories), `cvs commit', `cvs diff',
and `cvs status' -- see the info pages.
* Committing Changes
If you do not have write access to the repository, and have made
modifications that you would like us to incorporate, please mail the
`cvs diff -u' output along with a brief description of what the patch
does to <debian-boot@lists.debian.org>. It is helpful if you put
"[patch]" in the subject line.
Please try to make meaningful commit log entries that describe
something fairly specific about what changes you have made. It is
best to commit one file at a time, or group them logically, so that
modifications to several files that pertain to fixing one particular
bug or add a certain feature contain a log message that is relevant
for that file, without cruft about unrelated changes to unrelated
files. A massive commit of 15 files with a common log entry that
says "blah changes that fix bugs, C-u M-! fortune" are not very
useful later on when you are trying to find out when a certain change
happened. The log entry should describe what's been changed, so that
later on maintainers do not have to parse every single diff to find
one simple modification. You should be able to scan the log and
narrow down the search based on what's written there. There is a
good discussion of this in the GNU `Standards' info document, under
"Documenting Programs", "Change Logs". `Standards' is considered
required reading.
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