On Jan 15, 2007, at 12:39 AM, Christian Perrier wrote:
Quoting Rick Thomas (rbthomas55@pobox.com):It's sad to see d-i on powerpc, a major architectural variant, being eroded and neglected as a result of a few people who can't get past their own personal animosity to Sven. Whatever his merits or demerits -- and I'm not going to get drawn into a debate on that topic -- the powerpc architecture deserves better than it's seen recently.Can you give us examples of actions from the D-I team who could be used as illustrations of negligence towards the powerpc architecture users?
Well, OK:The one that particularly got to me was the very long dry spell for OldWorld PowerMacs during which etch would not boot on that hardware. Sarge ran fine, but until the advent of the 2.6.18 series of kernels, etch never got much beyond the bootloader(*). This resulted in "genetic drift" of applications software (specifically gstreamer is the one I know about. There are probably others.) because it couldn't be tested. The result is that now there's a very subtle release critical bug (#404876) and no time to fix it.
As Mathew just pointed out: Kernels not booting may not be d-i's fault, but it is their problem.
The underlying problem was that the infighting in the d-i team distracted the in-fighters from taking bug reports on this topic seriously. If Debian on powerpc hardware is to survive, the infighting problem has to be solved. You can blame other people all you want, but it won't solve the problem.
I don't expect the people this is about to understand what I'm talking about here. They are blinded by their own hatred, thus unable to see the larger problem.
The powerpc architecture deserves better than it's seen recently. Rick*) Bootloader == BootX in my case. I tried miboot as well, and it booted with a differently configured kernel, but when it came time to reboot into the production kernel, I got the same results -- nothing beyond the bootloader messages.