Re: Building package under kfreebsd/hurd
On 11/07/2016 12:46 AM, Elías Alejandro wrote:
> I wonder if there's a way to build packages for distinct
> architectures, specifically for
> Hurd or Kfreebsd. Do I have to create a new installation or use qemu?.
In my experience the easiest way to do so is to use a virtual
machine (I prefer libvirt + virt-manager with Qemu for that),
boot the machine, install an SSH server and
In the case of Hurd, you really don't want to use that on your
bare-metal hardware, because last time I checked it didn't
support USB yet. (If you don't need USB you can of course use
it. ;-)) kFreeBSD is not a problem in that regard, but unless
your system is really RAM-starved a VM is still much easier to
handle.
Note that it's not completely trivial to set up these machines.
The problem is that most installation media you can find are
a bit older, and if you've ever tried to install testing/sid
with an older installer, you can see that it often doesn't
quite work because sid will have moved on quite a bit. Plus
a lot of the documentation you find is a bit outdated for
both archs - there is more current documentation, but when
searching you more often than not find the outdated docs in
my experience, before you find the current ones.
In the case of Hurd Samuel Thibault provides premade images
you can use:
https://people.debian.org/~sthibault/hurd-i386/README
https://people.debian.org/~sthibault/hurd-i386/
I suspect that's going to be the easiest way of setting up a
VM there. (Please do a dist-upgraded before you actually use
them to try stuff though, they are relatively up to date, but
aren't daily images.)
In the case of kFreeBSD, I'm not completely sure anymore,
but if I remember correctly, I used the Jessie rc3 installer
to install the VM and then dist-upgraded to sid (by changing
the sources.list):
http://cdimage.debian.org/mirror/cdimage/archive/jessie_di_rc3/kfreebsd-amd64/iso-cd/
(That may or may not work, depending on whether I remember
correctly.)
In both cases (Hurd, kFreeBSD) please be aware that while a
lot of the everyday userland is still the same as with the
Linux ports (e.g. ls, cp, etc.), many administrative commands
are quite different or at least have different options / a
different output. Especially Hurd can be quite weird when you
first come in contact with it; once you get to know some of
the concepts and ideas behind it, it's actually really cool,
but there's a bit of a learning curve there.
Hope that helps.
> [1]https://wiki.debian.org/qemubuilder
I haven't tried that yet, but from reading the wiki page it
looks to me that it's mostly a Linux thing - and while there
is no inherent reason why fully-fledged VMs with Hurd or
kFreeBSD wouldn't work in principle with something like that,
I suspect that you'd need to fix a lot of things to make it
work. (I may be wrong though.) It's probably easier to just
use a virtual machine manually yourself.
Regards,
Christian
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