Hi all,
Sven Luther has recently announced [1] that he will no longer work on
PowerPC support in Debian Installer.
Colin Watson has already taken over the daily building of d-i images for
PowerPC, so working daily builds are available again. Colin is willing to
do that long term, but if a new porter should like to take care of that,
I'm sure this can be discussed.
So what does being a d-i porter involve?
Mainly it means taking responsibility for architecture specific issues.
Ideally this means:
- regular testing of the installer, preferably on different subarches
- keeping an eye out for installation reports for powerpc and following up
on them (especially if architecture specific issues are reported)
- taking care of architecture specific components of the installer, such
as kernel udebs, bootloader installers, some partman components
- reproducing, tracing and (hopefully) resolving bugs
- taking care of daily builds of d-i images
Familiarity with used filesystems and booting systems is a definite
advantage, but in general work on the installer itself is fairly easy as
most of it is scripted, with only some parts written in C.
Involvement on any level is welcome. Also, as PowerPC has several fairly
distinct subarchitectures, getting involved for a specific subarch is an
option.
The Debian Installer team is generally seen as open, friendly and helpful.
And it has to be as the "core" team is fairly small but depends on a lot
of effort from other developers, porters and translators to keep the
installer in working order for all the (sub)architectures it supports.
General help on the structure and inner workings of the installer and its
components is always available.
The last release of the installer (Etch Beta 2) had several PowerPC
specific issues [2]. We'd very much like to see these resolved. There are
also some open issues for the new graphical version of the installer.
If you are interested, please contact us on the debian-boot list.
Cheers,
Frans Pop
[1] http://lists.debian.org/debian-boot/2006/03/msg01075.html
[2] http://www.debian.org/devel/debian-installer/errata