On Monday 16 June 2008, Stephen Powell wrote: > Thanks for your reply, Frans. As for the enhancement requests for > e2fsprogs and s390-tools to respect and support the RECOMP option of > CMS minidisks, those are not distribution specific. I would hope that > they could be bumped upstream. To be honest: that is not very likely. Especially not in this case. Suppose we push them all upstream and only one upstream actually picks it up and we implement that. That would still leave us nowhere... What needs to happen here is that someone takes the lead, gathers a team to work on it and coordinates all development effort, preferably working with all involved upstreams, and then pushes things down to distributions who only then can really make necessary changes in their distribution specific software. Probably that team would pick one distribution as their base to work from, and that distribution would get a head start in supporting it in their next release. It would be great if that were to be Debian, but it could be any. And RedHat and Suse are much more likely to be able to contribute development effort than Debian currently is. > In theory, partman is not distribution-specific either, and, in theory, > could also be bumped upstream. I'm afraid that partman is _very_ Debian specific and you're basically talking to the upstream (the team behind debian-boot mailing list). What is not Debian specific is the libparted library and a pre-requirement for implementing anything in partman is that libparted supports it, or that it is supported by separate command line utilities that can be used. parted is maintained separately from partman. > As for me, I am a z/VM Systems Programmer, I do have an interest, I do > have some time, and I do have access to z/VM and mainframe hardware. > And I would be glad to assist you in testing. What I don't have is > expertise in C. I can barely spell C. Neither can I... Debian Installer is mostly written in shell script and my personal background is custom business applications (last major job was in an mainframe/Cobol/IDMS environment :-). As I mentioned in my previous mail: the problem is lack of people actually working on s390 for Debian. I only do minor "testing and keep existing things running" work on the installer. I'm not involved in anything else. We have one person who does have the skills, but he already carries most of the s390 Debian port and I expect he just won't have the time, even if he is/were interested. > For what it's worth, the S390 Linux community is a vibrant one. Great. Question is how to translate that into active involvement in the Debian s390 port. > I'm going to be attending a class next week taught > by IBM on how to install Linux on System z, and I'm sure that they will > talk pretty much exclusively about Suse and Red Hat, both of which are > commercial distributions and both of which are IBM "partners". I've > attended Linux for S390 install classes before, but it's been about > five years and it's time for an update. In the process of taking the > class, I'm going to be privately trying to determine if there is any > strategic advantage to those distros other than a support contract. You could also use that class to see if anyone knows what actually needs doing to get the support you want and if anybody would be willing to work on it. Possibly the other distros already do support it and it "only" needs porting to Debian (which can still involve quite a bit of work). Cheers, FJP
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