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Re: Why it's so difficult to fix PowerMac booting for good



On 05/29 2023 07:59 John Paul Adrian Glaubitz wrote:
You're underestimating the number of times the GRUB package gets updated,
that happens a lot [1] which is why I don't think your suggestion to use a
static GRUB image is ever going to fly.

I don't see that many GRUB version updates on Gentoo (on amd64). Maybe
from twice to three times a year, but not more. For this purpose a
version bump is from 2.04 to 2.06, but not from 2.06-12 to 2.06-13 if
the specific binaries aren't any different (it's still version 2.06)
Looking at https://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/grub/ version bumps are even rarer...

What we need is a free implementation of the HFS(+) utilities which is what
I am trying to achieve now. This is the only proper solution as it integrates
with the design of debian-installer.

Why are the respective packages maked "GPL-2" on Gentoo Linux then?

*  sys-fs/hfsplusutils
      Latest version available: 1.0.4-r3
      Latest version installed: 1.0.4-r3
      Size of files: 182 KiB
      Homepage:      http://penguinppc.org/historical/hfsplus/
      Description:   HFS+ Filesystem Access Utilities (a PPC filesystem)
      License:       GPL-2

*  sys-fs/hfsutils
      Latest version available: 3.2.6_p15
      Latest version installed: 3.2.6_p15
      Size of files: 210 KiB
      Homepage:      https://www.mars.org/home/rob/proj/hfs/
      Description:   HFS FS Access utils
      License:       GPL-2

Only diskdev_cmds is APSL-2 licensed (which to my knowledge is
considered a free license as well,
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/apsl.html):

*  sys-fs/diskdev_cmds
      Latest version available: 332.14_p1-r4
      Latest version installed: 332.14_p1-r4
      Size of files: 719 KiB
      Homepage:      http://opendarwin.org
      Description:   HFS and HFS+ utils ported from OSX, supplies mkfs
and fsck
      License:       APSL-2


Utilities included in hfsutils are:
  hattrib
  hcd
  hcopy
  hdel
  hdir
  hformat
  hfsck
  hls
  hmkdir
  hmount
  hpwd
  hrename
  hrmdir
  humount
  hvol

So, hformat to create the HFS volume, hcopy and hattrib to populate it
with the required boot files. And all is GPL-2 licensed...
https://www.mars.org/home/rob/proj/hfs/

Any other approaches like this hack to supply a static image would make things
much more complicated. In particular, I don't think the other maintainers within
debian-installer would be amused if I placed a static HFS image several hundred
megabytes inside into a udeb package that has currently an unpacked size of 168
kilobytes [2].

Understood. Yes, having the hfs utilities available will definitely help
a lot.

Linux User #330250


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