RFH: kfreebsd upstreaming effort for util-linux
Hello kFreeBSD porters!
I've been working on an updated util-linux package and the result is
currently available in experimental.
I've previously contacted the patch authors for kfreebsd-related
patches in the util-linux package, but I'm now reaching out to
the wider kfreebsd community in hope to get some response.
The background is that the Debian util-linux package maintainers
do not have the resources to carry the burden of maintaining
things on their own and backing themselves into a corner has
resulted in updating the util-linux package in debian has become
a gigantic hurdle to overcome. This has resulted in no updates
being done for years despite a large number of bugs being found
(and fixed upstream).
I've worked hard on sorting out many of the problems and are
now reaching out to you for help with the kfreebsd-specific
bits.
On the kfreebsd side we have three main issues to deal with...
First, for the record there are many testsuite failures on kfreebsd.
Some probably quite obvious but the silent failure of creating
sunlabel looks scary in my eyes. I'm not going to make passing the
testsuite a strict requirement but would be preferrable.
The short term issue is that since fsck now depends on libmount
which has not been ported to anything but linux so far it is
not built in the new package on non-linux platforms.
I've created a "proof of concept" set of patches to make it possible
to build fsck on kfreebsd again. This is done by mostly gutting
libmount to disable all the mount bits in it and while I've tried
to make the patches as small as possible, I hope people can see that
this is likely something that could become very problematic to keep
alive if we don't get an upstream effort going ...
In other words, I'm not willing to maintain these patches!
My patches are available at: https://people.debian.org/~ah/ul-kfreebsd-fsck/
This leads us into the long term issue. The kfreebsd porters needs
to get an upstream effort going to have upstream util-linux buildable
on kfreebsd. (The Debian Hurd porters have already/always done their part.)
The current package still contains a bunch of kfreebsd patches to
make it build. I've asked the people listed as patch authors to
follow the procedure to get their patches forwarded upstream but
I haven't heard anything back so far.
It would be very helpful if someone would be willing to look at
the current patch set to make sure the rebased versions look good
and are still relevant to know which parts should be forwarded upstream
and which parts can just be dropped.
You'll also need to investigate the possibility of getting the original
authors of the patches to sign off on them, and as a back up investigate
if upstream has a strict requirement for patches to be signed off or
if you can just redo the work of porting util-linux yourself.
(See "developer certificate of origin" for more info if you're not
familiar with Signed-off-by...)
If I can't find anyone interested in working on these issues future
versions of util-linux will probably no longer ship /sbin/fsck on
kfreebsd (and if the existing patchset becomes problematic for some
reason the package might stop building completely on this arch).
The current work is available in collab-maint git at:
http://anonscm.debian.org/cgit/collab-maint/pkg-util-linux.git/
(See the debian-2.25 branch or newer...)
Regards,
Andreas Henriksson
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