Re: debian hurd -- a little help?
On Thu, Dec 03, 1998 at 02:33:30PM -0500, Roland McGrath wrote:
> With the generous help of fine volunteers like Mark Kettenis, OKUJI
> Yoshinori, UCHIYAMA Yasushi (and others), we have been making some good
> progress recently on getting gnumach and the hurd in usable shape.
Congratulations!
> We are ready to make some updated debian packages for libc, hurd, and
> gnumach, and get other people bootstrapped to start building other debian
> packages on the hurd. But we haven't heard anything in a while from
> debian-hurd folks, and we have (or at least I have) no clue about debian.
>
> So how can we make these things happen?
Well, in case you haven't noticed yet, Santiago, Gordon and me were busy
building Debian packages for the Hurd. There already are packaged binary
versions of libc (2.0.4 though), gnumach and hurd (and several other gnu
software, too). Below are two pointers for you to look at.
Santiago did the latest glibc 2.0.4 package upload, I did the uploads for GNU
Mach and the Hurd.
To get going, we need the following:
a) You should upload a snapshot or version numbered source tar file for the
packages you want to have released. We have CVS access, so it is probably
enough to tag the repository and let us know what tag to use.
Nevertheless, a tar file is better, because we have to provide one anyway.
The Debian packaging files will be applied by me (or the developer doing
the package) and we cross compile the software and upload the package.
(we can include the debian directory to CVS, too, if you want to
experiment with it. Usually it is just added by the maintainer and saved in
a diff against the upstream source)
Santiago wrote a few pages about cross compiling and porting Debian
packages, check the Debian GNU/Hurd FAQ.
b) We need to refine the packaging scripts. You already gave great
explanations about how translators work. This has to be implemented in the
Debian scripts and refined.
c) We need a boot strap mechanism, preferably some sort of boot disk or tar
file that can be unpacked on an empty partition. Currently no one (?) is
working on it.
People volunteering should take a look at the Debian boot-floppies
package, which does the trick for Debian GNU/Linux. If it is too hard to put
Hurd on a floppy, we can use Linux boot floppies to install a Hurd system.
d) We still need to port a lot of software. Some require some tricks, some
should be relativley easy. We collected a lot of knowledge about cross
compiling the last weeks/months. However, we should compile the software
with the new libc, gnumach and hurd.
We have patches for ncurses and gcc, so they will compile fast. We have
already cross compiled some packages, they will also be no problem. We
need perl (dpkg uses it extensively). Me personally will care about dpkg
and friends.
So, the first action by you should be to do a release, if you haven't done
already. For gnumach and hurd, this is the right thing. What about glibc?
Which version shall we use? I have anonymous CVS, so I can get any version
we need, even the latest.
Thank you,
Marcus
--
"Rhubarb is no Egyptian god." Debian GNU/Linux finger brinkmd@
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