Escalating #345067 to the technical comittee, as the maintainer asked me to do so, and is unable or unwilling to do his job without this.
reassign 345067 tech-ctte
thanks
Hello,
It has been over 2 month now since this bug was first created because of some
hacky patch which was added to yaird to work around some ugly ide-generic
related bugginess. This caused yaird to always load ide-generic when using
some subset of ide controllers (piix, via and another one), and fail if
ide-generic was not present.
This patch was applied without really understanding the situation, with to
this day has not been really clarified, as testified by recent discussion on
the debian-kernel irc channel a few hours ago.
The problem here is that the patch was applied without caring that one some
arches (at least powerpc, maybe others), didn't even build ide-generic. This
resulted in the kernel (which back then defaulted on using yaird) no longer
being installable on those powerpc machines who had the above ide controllers,
which in particular concerns the pegasos machine which has a via controller.
I filled a bug, noticed an earlier bug was filled and merged them, then i got
together with someone who spoke perl, and proposed a patch which disabled the
hack on powerpc. Not really the best solution, but it was the less intrusive
patch i could propose in hope of fast inclusion, but never got any kind of
reply from the yaird maintainer.
I meet Jonas at the Erkelenz skolelinux.de meeting in late january, and agreed
to downgrade the severity because k-p now reverted to calling initramfs-tools
if yaird failed and defaulted to initramfs-tools for powerpc for 2.6.15. I
proposed to Jonas to fix this issue, but he refused, and prefered to argue
that he didn't understand the issue enough, that it 'may' break in some
obscure cases, without being able to specify such cases or even wanting to
think about what those cases where, that he was anyway unable to understand
yaird enough to do any kind of fixes without first hearing from his upstream.
We hadn't heard about Erik since late december, and i immediately wrote him a
post, but never got any kind of reply since then, and we are now in early
march, and there is no reply from Erik since then.
In Erkelenz, jonas clearly told me that he would not consieder my patch until
i refered to the technical comitee, and altough i have waited until now for
him to take his job of yaird maintainer seriously, this clearly appears not to
be the case, and i am thus escalating the issue to you.
This whole issue still shows a worse problem though, it is clear that the
yaird package is not correctly maintained, and that jonas is unable to do any
kind of work on yaird without his upstream, and that his upstream has gone
MIA. I doubt it is sane to ship yaird as part of etch in these conditions
until something changes in its maintainership.
Friendly,
Sven Luther
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