Re: Status

[Ulf Carlsson <ulfc@cthulhu.engr.sgi.com>]

On Tue, Oct 26, 1999 at 12:55:36AM +0200, Florian Lohoff wrote:
> On Mon, Oct 25, 1999 at 08:39:50PM +0200, Carlos Segura wrote:
> > Hi Florian,
> > 
> > > There is still no debian-mips(el) port ...
> > 
> > Then where I'm supposed to start the work? I want collaborate in the port,
> > but I need some start point.
> > What is the project's current status?
> 
> I have no clue if you are little or big endian - I am little so
> i am doing "mipsEL" not "mips".
> 
> I got the machine (Decstation) to boot and then took the dpkg source
> package and extracted it and build a dpkg (Watch the archtable - It should
> contain your architecture).
> 
> Then just extract debhelper, dpkg-dev etc with ar and hack it into
> you base system. Then create some wild dirs/files at /var/lib/dpkg
> and you should be able to build packages with dpkg-buildpackage.
> 
> Once you have the first 20-40 Packages done everything gets easier ...
> 
> I am currently just building packages by hand and immediatly install
> them into my system. 
> 
> I "nearly" replaced everything needed to boot so probably ill get
> an "base.tgz" for debian-mipsel together next weekend ...

This is pretty cool.  You're building the Debian distribution out of the Redhat
installation?  I've tried to do that, but I just ended up with a lot of problems
because of the differences in Debian compared to Redat.  I ended up with some
strange mixture that didn't work at all.  I resorted to cross compiling after a
couple of hopeless attempts, and that was actually easier.

Good luck!

Ulf