Re: questions about debian/hurd...
On Sun, May 29, 2005 at 09:22:23AM -0500, Colin Watson wrote:
> On Sun, May 29, 2005 at 01:43:13PM +1200, Philip Charles wrote:
> > Once sarge is released could we get the d-i team to start looking at
> > incorporating Debian GNU/Hurd into the installer?
>
> I'm one of the d-i hackers and I've been working on this for the last
> week or so already, although I had been hoping to announce that fact
> only once I actually had something that worked. :-)
Awesome!
> I've got untested patches to the build system, rootskel, and
> base-installer; I've made libdebian-installer build, and uploaded
> quite a few binaries from the dependency tree above that; I've made
> some progress on netcfg; and I've got a hit-list of other Linux
> assumptions I know about that we need to iron out. Once I have an
> installer image that boots at all, I may be able to get one or two
> other d-i developers interested in helping out.
Rock! :)
> If people want to help out before that, a debootstrap port which can
> build a Hurd chroot from a Hurd system would help; basically, take the
> modifications made to debootstrap's 'functions' file in crosshurd which
> work around the lack of passive translator support in tar, port them
> back up to current debootstrap, and make them be used only when
> installing Debian architectures matching hurd-* so that the patch has a
> chance of being incorporated into the Debian debootstrap package.
We talked to aj about that a while ago; he seemed to be quite receptive
to changes here. As I now got a network-enabled Hurd box, I looked at
debootstrap again. I got the sid.buildd script mostly working now, but
I got problems when the base packages are getting installed, I got a lot
of 'Resource busy' errors I think. I will upload a package to
ftp.gnuab.org for testing in due shot.
> It would also be useful to have gnumach-udeb and hurd-udeb, please. They
> should have pretty much the same contents as their .deb equivalents,
> but:
[...]
I just uploaded a new hurd package with a hurd-udeb. Tell what is
missing (a isofs.static probably for instance).
> A native first-stage installer should not require the native-install
> script; that should all be set up by debootstrap. I think it's OK to
> concentrate entirely on native installation in d-i, and leave the
> cross-installation to crosshurd et al; native installation is a better
> long-term strategy anyway, since for example the installer won't offer
> you the chance to set up network interfaces that are unsupported by the
> Hurd.
Ok. We thought about booting Linux d-i first and then using
cross-debootstrap (aj split it up in two phases, only the second one
needs to be executed natively, that code might be in his development
version only) and later a ported/hacked base-config. However, if you
think a native port is feasable, that's great to hear and we shall
concentrate on that.
> I don't think base-config should require any more than trivial porting
> (e.g. disabling Linux-specific keyboard configuration, some
> Linux-specific parts of hostname configuration, etc.). That won't really
> be interesting until later on.
Glad to hear that, I was a bit worried about base-config. But I got to
admit I never took more than a cursory glance at either d-i or
base-config.
Thanks a lot Colin for your interest,
Michael
--
Michael Banck
Debian Developer
mbanck@debian.org
http://www.advogato.org/person/mbanck/diary.html
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