Bug#482902: please provide libc6-hppa64 and libc6-hppa64-dev packages
> > The developer machines have been unavailable for months, so Debian
> > developers who don't have their own hppa machine are unable to work on
> > their own packages or fix bugs.
>
> We had some machines setup and running last year....what happened to them?
> Is lamont the only person able to support those?
The DD accessible machine is paer.debian.org and there are a few hppa
buildd machines that are just accessible by the buildd folks like lamont.
These machines are all supported by DSA and run Debian stable.
I am one of the local admins for them, and up until about a year ago, I was
the only person who was trying to support kernels on debian stable (then
sarge on those machines). Everyone else in the hppa community had moved on
to unstable and newer kernels. For quite a while I was able to install
unstable kernels directly along with a backport of a few tools (mkinitramfs
type stuff), then the unstable kernels required things that weren't so easy
to provide... but that could be worked around by hacking the postinst at
install time, but eventually it got too difficult to use anything already
existing in Debian so we just stuck with the kernels we had and I quit
tracking it.
Since then DSA has moved the machines to etch, but the etch kernels (older
than some of the unstable kernels I has been installing on sarge) had
problems. On top of that all the recent kernel security advisories have
meant that trying to run anything that wasn't supported by the security
team would mean a lot of work. Without someone trying to produce debs to
support etch (either fixing the debs in stable or making a working
backport), we had no way to keep the machines up and running and up to date
with security advisories. This was mentioned on the list and DSA has asked
for help a few times, but nobody has worked on it so the machines are still
locked down.
> My impression was my and Thibaut's efforts to provide public access
> to parisc/ia64 machines has covered the visible need.
> But that's been informal and not a substitute for having official
> machines up and running.
I'm not sure how Thibaut is generating his kernels and running his
machines, but if he can do it in a DSA supportable manner (which means etch
userspace and kernel packages up to date with security patches) then maybe
he can help get the debian.org machines accessible again. I suspect he is
probably running unstable and building kernels by hand though...
--
Matt Taggart
taggart@debian.org
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