On Mon, Jan 19, 2004 at 02:23:27PM -0600, John Goerzen wrote:
> On Mon, Jan 19, 2004 at 12:20:20PM -0700, Joel Baker wrote:
> > I see that mjg has already answered this to a fair degree; therefore, I'll
> > mostly only be commenting on things he didn't cover in detail, that I
> > happen to know.
>
> Thanks for your replies. I guess the one question I have right now is:
>
> How can I dive in and start playing with the system? Or is that even
> possible now, given the state of the archive?
The simplest way, though fraught with issues of questionable usefulness,
would be to grab the chroot tarball from somewhere I put it up, install
a native NetBSD(i386) system (minimal install required), unpack it into
/debian (or wherever), 'sudo chroot /debian /bin/bash', and poke around
some. :)
> > As said, there are two answers. For the 'native' port, we have the
> > following things either officially or almost-officially packaged:
> >
> > netbsd-make (NetBSD native make/pmake/bmake variant, needed for building )
> > netbsd-libc (libc, libm, et al kernel-source-current (aka CVS src/sys )
> >
> > The first two are known to build in a chroot environment and produce valid
> > and useable Debian packages. The latter is still being packaged, and may
> > need a kernel-package style helper package; the main holdup on this is the
> > issue over introducing that much source code under a 4-clause BSD license
> > from a source known to care about advertising clauses.
>
> What component exactly is the one with the BSD-plus-advertising?
>
> > Yes. Less steadily than at times, but still actively. I'm also working on
> > the naming issue with TNF and other folks, which is a necessary long-term
Something like 10,000 fil, counting all of the source tree. Counting only
the kernel sources, libc sources, and make sources is still not a small
number. Thankfully, most of these are "three dozen files have the same
copyright by the same author and can all be updated at once".
> What's TNF?
The NetBSD Foundation. The legal entity which looks after NetBSD's
interests, much like SPI looks after Debian's.
> > > 3. Where could I best contribute to the port? Would an autobuilder be
> > > useful? (I do have experience running those; I used to run the one for
> > > our Alpha port.)
> >
> > It would be, once we can get one even chroot-installed, prefferably
> > real-installed; while I had very good success at squashing bug problems on
> > my old box, and getting things basically workable, it ate so much time (due
> > to bootstrapping a port always being time-intensive) that I mostly only
> > ever got around to recompiling things if a newer version showed up in a
> > dependancy of some sort.
>
> I completely understand that. I don't have experience with a port in
> quite the early stage that this one is, but at the time I ran an
> autobuilder on Alpha, we indeed had that problem since packages were
> build when people felt like it.
Welcome to the insanity. :)
> To me, a key benefit of Debian GNU/*NetBSD is the Debian userland and
> software already ported to the Debian .deb system. I have been looking
> at the NetBSD pkgsrc system this week, and have basically concluded that
> a lot of the software that I want an am accustomed to in Debian is
> either missing or too outdated to be useful. It would actually be
> easier for me, long term, to help the Debian port to NetBSD, I think.
> :-)
Quite possibly, especially if you want the Debian management tools.
> > We have a wishlist ftp-archive bug open to get space, but that almost
> > certainly won't be resolved until we can show the world (or at least
> > debian-devel) a compelling demonstration that we have our act together,
> > and can actually get, for example, an entire base system installed and
> > functioning, using debian-installer. Until then, we're unlikely to have
>
> I'd suggest that debian-installer is not necessarily a prerequisite
> here (hurd-i386 doesn't use it yet, for instance), but yeah, I can see
> the rest. OTOH, hurd seems to have gotten space at a pretty early
> stage. We may at least be able to get some space on some other server
> like quantz. If you'd like, I could ask Wichert about that. (I already
> have some major stuff there, such as my 1GB Arch repository of the Linux
> kernel source with every version since 0.01 <grin>)
>
I doubt that hurd would be quite so able to get space today, frankly.
In part because of exactly this - they got it earlier, before the
proliferation of various dead-end ports, and also in part because the FSF
paid for some amount of Debian stuff, early on, wanting to use it as the
showcase OS while they developed Hurd for things to run on.
If, and when, the current servers prove to be inadequite, I have no problem
with asking for help, but I think managing to accomplish that would be a
large step towards demonstrating the usefulness of a proper architecture
area in the main archive, so.
> > would probably speed up getting the lightbearer.com archive back, so if
> > you happen to like python, that might, oddly enough, be very useful. :)
>
> I do happen to like Python[1]. However, I'm not presently in the market
> for a new mailing list manager, so I'm afraid I'll just have to help in
> more direct ways :-)
*chuckle*
--
Joel Baker <fenton@debian.org> ,''`.
Debian GNU/NetBSD(i386) porter : :' :
`. `'
`-
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