New powerpc kernel packages accepted.

[Sven Luther <luther@gluck.debian.org>]

Hello,

Finally, the new powerpc kernel packages have been accepted and will
probably enter the archive this evening. This means that as of tomorrow,
the powerpc build will be broken, and i will try to fix what needs
fixing in debian-installer today or tomorrow.

Saddly, it is as i have feared, that the package will be accpepted on
the eve of me going out for christmas and being offline until monday the
29. But well, this is the disorganized way debian works, and we have to
make do.

So, i will try to fix this evening and tomorrow morning, but i would
appreciate if other persons interested in the debian port would also
look at it after that, in particular to make sure that i didn't break
stuff on non chrp hardware.

Now, there is a number of remaining problems for proper powerpc support
in d-i, some of them i can work, and other i cannot.

  1) there is some RTC issue on powerpc/pegasos i will be fixing this
  morning, not really d-i related though.

  2) Well, on chrp (and probably pmac, but there we don't care) there is
  a size limit to the initrd we can use (1.4Mo (boot-floppies) works,
  2.2Mo (debian-installer cd target) don't). We can use the 1.1Mo net
  target initrd though, or copy the initrd to a partition and boot from
  there. I need to fix this, but it is not an easy thing.

  3) Someone need to work on the miboot floppy target, using the
  powerpc-small kernel that will be available, for support on old world
  pmacs.

Also, i have a problem concerning the devfs stuff. There is a (generic)
bug in the kernel, which makes the /proc/partitions show the devfs path
even if devfs is not mounted. This is problematic, since altough the
tools will be able to handle that, it will really be confusing for the
users.

Now, would it make sense to postpone the beta2 to a more reasonable
date (january 11 for example), or do we drop powerpc support for the
beta2 and release a beta3 shortly thereafter ? A December 31 beta2
release date would be ok also, since i will be again here the 29 and 30,
and be able to fix stuff if needed.

Friendly,

Sven Luther