Creating a PowerPC task force?

[Rogério Brito <rbrito@ime.usp.br>]

Dear people,

Motivated by:

* the results of the last call to porters
* the fact that PowerPC (at least) used to be an architecture where Debian
  shined
* the lack of external support (which means that we should help ourselves)
* the documentation that is too spread
* the need of architecture-specific tools (pbbuttonsd? mouseemu?
  gtkpbbutons? anything that needs to be revived? yahoot? grub2?)

I thought: perhaps are people out there that may be interested in shaping up
the powerpc port of Debian?

In fact, since:

* Ubuntu doesn't offer an official PowerPC release anymore.
* Apple has long given up updating the operating system for PowerPC users.
* Major projects like Chromium/v8/nodejs are not available for PowerPC.
* Firefox for PowerPC is essentially dead as far as Mozilla is concerned,
  with only a very bright enthusiast working on building it with JavaScript
  acceleration (http://tenfourfox.blogspot.com/),

we are essentially orphans of the architecture. Again, would anybody else be
interested in addressing the current problems that PowerPC seems to have?

It would be super nice to work on having the installs as good as possible
(meaning: "working with as little fiddling as possible after a fresh
install"), integrating intelligence about snd-aoa, snd-powermac etc. in
debian-installer, making the 3D thing work as well as feasible,
automatically suggesting programs (alas, even firmware) that are of use for
a powerpc user?

What about this idea?

Perhaps we can already grab/compile the resources that others have already
kept (say, the Gentoo pages, which are very good, the Ubuntu PowerPC FAQ,
which is another very good resource), an old document that I, a long time
ago, started writing at https://github.com/rbrito/powerpc-tutorial etc.

Of course, having both the document for those people that want to know how
things are done and having the code that just works is the golden goal...

Please, let me know if you are interested in joining efforts. I will only
commit efforts if I see other people contributing, as I have my hands full
already.


Thanks,

-- 
Rogério Brito : rbrito@{ime.usp.br,gmail.com} : GPG key 4096R/BCFCAAAA
http://cynic.cc/blog/ : github.com/rbrito : profiles.google.com/rbrito
DebianQA: http://qa.debian.org/developer.php?login=rbrito%40ime.usp.br