Re: Making an apt-able GNU/Hurd CDROM

[Marcus Brinkmann <Marcus.Brinkmann@ruhr-uni-bochum.de>]

Am Don, 02 Nov 2000 03:22:35 schrieb Philip Charles:
> I see the way forward like this;
> 1. Boot-floppies.  Good enough.
> 2. Dselect to be fully functional with a Hurd CD.  Hurd hackers needed.

dselect is probably okay (I used it often without problems)
although the one in the experimental dpkg 1.6.999 may be broken.
What is causing hickups in dselect are the unsatisfied dependencies
on various linux packages. It's not easy to synchronize ourselve
to the ever moving Linux target. Those problems are local to individual
packages and need to be fixed there.

> 3. Incorporate the dselect into the tarball.  Marcus.

Uh, dselect is part of the dpkg package and thus in every tar
file ever since. Isn't it?

> 8. Release Hurd 0.1 - this could be minimal, but it would work.

Hurd 0.2 was released 1997. What is needed is Hurd 0.3, but that's the
Hurd hackers business. What we do is Debian GNU/Hurd, and what we call
it is "unstable snapshot" or whatever.
 
> What would be helpful would be another category "Priority: experimental"
> for unstable/unproved packages.  This would mean that the file system
> could contain two or more versions of a package, eg "Priority: required"
> and "Priority: experimental".  This would remove the neccessity of having
> a frozen file system.  However, this is a policy matter and would need
> considerable discussion.

I don't think so. We just need a couple of more people identifying and
fixing those nasty little dependencies problems and doing more porting.
BTW, Anthony Towns wrote a lot of scripts to test the consistency of
the ftp archive. One if these might help us to identify missing or
conflicting packages. (aj@debian.org)

Thanks,
Marcus