Re: not releasing powerpc (Re: beta3 released)

[Sven Luther <sven.luther@wanadoo.fr>]

On Tue, Mar 16, 2004 at 01:04:27AM +0000, Colin Watson wrote:
> On Mon, Mar 15, 2004 at 07:44:20PM -0500, Joey Hess wrote:
> > I've dropped powerpc entirely from beta3. Of the images we produced, the
> > netinst CD images do not work for any powerpc subarch, because they
> > don't have usable kernels on them. Also, the kernel images have a broken
> > postinst that does not set up the /vmlinux symlink for yaboot. And
> > yaboot-installer hardcoded the path[1] to archdetect and gets it wrong, so
> > that's also broken. For details, talk to Colin Watson.
> 
> yaboot-installer is #238208, trivial fix therein.
> 
> The kernel images have a postinst that looks like this:
> 
>   # Only change the symlinks if we are not being upgraded
>   # (strangely broken on powerpc, i wonder why, let's work around it so d-i is not broken.
>   if ((! defined $ARGV[1] || ! $ARGV[1] || $ARGV[1] =~ m/<unknown>/og) && $arch !~ m/powerpc/) {
>     image_magic($kimage, $image_dest);
>   }
>   else {
>     print STDERR "Not updating image symbolic links since we are being updated ($ARGV[1])\n";
>   }

Ok, it was my fault then.

> I can't work out from the kernel-patch-2.4.22-powerpc changelog what was
> "strangely broken on powerpc", but whatever it was the workaround has
> broken newworld systems that use yaboot and expect that symlink. Sven,
> do you have details of the cause of this change?

Not really. I did change this, because without that, the package would
refuse to install. I don't remember the details, but it was a pain to
work around it. The main reason being that kernel-package is severly
broken.

> > Rather than say that beta3 supports only netboot and businesscard
> > installs for prep and chrp, I've dropped the whole thing. If the powerpc
> > people would like to release in a week, I suggest you get your act
> > together and begin testing full installs on all powerpc subarches.
> 
> I'm sorry for not getting into newpmac testing until late in the game.
> Unless I can figure out how to do something USB-stick-ish, I guess I'll
> invest in a stock of blank CDs and keep going.

a CD-RW will do wonders here :)

Also, i had the impression that since a month or more, i was the only
one really doing tests, so ...

> > (Also, the hurried yaboot-installer release made yesterday to fix *other*
> > serious problems on powerpc was never actually committed to the CVS
> > tree.)
> 
> Yes it was, just on a branch (debian_version_0_0_13_fixes). On the
> trunk, libdebian-installer claims to have a fix for the root cause of
> that problem.

Mmm, i have had a report from a user yesterday, which told me that
base-installer seems broken again, since he gets the -apus kernel
installed on his pegasos. Strange since i don't had this issue yesterday
morning.

Friendly,

Sven Luther