On Tue, Dec 02, 2003 at 01:30:55AM +0100, Robert Millan wrote:
> On Mon, Dec 01, 2003 at 05:18:29PM -0500, Nathan Hawkins wrote:
> > Also, I'd like to point out to you that when this started, none of the
> > people involved had any real experience with porting Debian. So that
> > learning curve, plus RL demands on our time, had a lot to do with the
> > time it took to accomplish anything. Anyway, I seem to recall that the
> > critical part of my work on the native libc port got done in about 2-3
> > months.
>
> I recall having participated in both ports years ago. I do also recall seeing
> GNU/*BSD systems with *BSD libc based on _slink_. Seems obvious that progress
> is very slow with *BSD libc's.
And, last I knew, pretty much all of that work got thrown out the window
because it had suffered serious bitrot as Debian (and the BSDs) moved
forward, while nobody was hammering on it actively.
I know that the vast majority of my work was done in intermittent bursts
of about a month each, as life allowed them.
> > > And I have seen your "less work" patches already. Xfree86 and pam are good
> > > examples. Have a look at them.
> >
> > We fixed pam to run on native libc a long time ago. It wasn't that bad,
> > once I got libshadow written. And last I knew you didn't have an X
> > server package, which I had on the native libc a long time ago.
>
> I was referring to the GNU/NetBSD port. See bug #201683 for example, and
> compare it to the one-liner patch I sent to pam. As for Xfree86, try
> "wc -l debian/patches/84*" in the source tree. Just a pair of examples.
>
> (btw, fixing the X server is on my todo)
All I have to say about the X server, as the person who generated most
of the patches, is that they're actually very straightforward, if rather
invasive. I simply had to go through each config option and decide whether
it should be handled in the 'native' way, or the GNU-userland way (and it
was very much a userland issue, not a libc issue).
The *hard* part was in hunting down build problems and bad assumptions in
something the size of the X codebase. That isn't going to be any saner on a
Glibc+FreeBSD system; probably less sane, in fact.
--
Joel Baker <fenton@debian.org> ,''`.
Debian GNU NetBSD/i386 porter : :' :
`. `'
`-
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