Bug#482902: please provide libc6-hppa64 and libc6-hppa64-dev packages

[Matt Taggart <taggart@debian.org>]

> > 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