Taking over maintainance of yaboot ?

[Benjamin Cama <benoar@free.fr>]

Hi,

I am trying to exactly understand the bugs that currently affect the
Debian PPC port and particularly yaboot. There are many bugs around it,
but even before trying to fix them, we should check if it's even
possible to get them applied ! And as we saw (a lot due to Rick Thomas
work) yaboot is currently unmaintained and as been so for a very long
time (see http://packages.qa.debian.org/y/yaboot.html ). I am Cc'ing
Aurélien Gérôme just in case, but without much hope, and Sven Luther has
left for a long time.

The problem is : who could take yaboot over ? There are no DD that I
know of in the debian-ppc community and yaboot is quite arch-specific.
Furthermore, I am not very familiar with how such a take-over could take
place : I've had a look at
http://www.debian.org/doc/developers-reference/beyond-pkging.html#mia-qa
and I am planning to write to mia@qa.debian.org, but help on gathering
information is welcome. I am also wondering if a NMU could be possible.

Then, updating yaboot to the latest known active development branch
(http://yaboot.ozlabs.org/ ) would help a lot our port to stay alive, as
many have noted that Debian on PPC looks a bit dead from "outside".

Another problem is that a lot of information is lost because this
mailing-list is one of the "last" place to get information about Linux
on PPC for desktop users but digging in the archives is no always easy.
I think we should try to gather information on the wiki :
http://wiki.debian.org/PowerPC

If anyone want to help have a correct PPC port for Squeeze, please
join !

Regards,
benjamin