The PowerPC port is about to be without an unstable build daemon again. While we could scrounge up an old machine with fairly little trouble, I've been trying to arrange a new machine for the project for a couple of reasons: - debian-installer The new-world power macs are miserably supported by boot-floppies right now; a lot of effort from Ethan Benson has gotten it to a useable state, but for the new installer I would strongly prefer to have access to a machine to test on. - X The current project PowerPCs represent the period when Apple was using old, proprietary video chipsets; I would prefer to have some new machine available to test the current experimental X packages on. - libc6 PowerPC hasn't transitioned to 2.1.9x yet. I'm sure it will cause some unexpected problems; there is no developer-accessible machine on which we could hunt them down. The only PowerPC currently available for developer use is the machine donated to me by LinuxPPC, Inc., and hosted by Brainfood. It provides the stable and proposed-updates build daemon, and is used by the security team. Thus it isn't appropriate for unstable work, and it doesn't have enough disk for a chroot. And also just for general developer access; it would be very convenient if more machines were available for curious developers to test on. While there are several other solutions (like putting more disk space into the stable buildd, which would be a far from ideal stopgap), there are also quite a few advantages in having a separate machine. I've been reluctant to raise the idea of using project funds for this, as I'm thinking of a machine that would be hosted with me, and thus I would get the lion's share of benefit from it; I've been approaching possible sponsors to have one donated, but no one has been able to do so. However, with the current build daemon about to become inaccessible, I want to at least get a feeling for public opinion on a topic we've been avoiding: the use of the project's funds. We receive a fair amount in donations, as well as at least two major monetary prizes; is development hardware a reasonable use of this money? If not, what is? In other words, I would like to ask for the use of Debian funds to purchase a PowerPC for the project, or at least to partly purchase it. Another thing to consider is that there is no unstable machine of any architecture available for developer use. This has bitten us repeatedly - all small problems, but very annoying. I'd like to see this change. Perhaps, if we have the funds and the project thinks it a worthwhile idea, we can even pursue the build cluster proposals that come up regularly. Right now, we don't even know quite how much money the project has; obviously, it isn't doing us very much good. It's good to have against a rainy day (emergency drive replacements and the like), but I think that there is more we could do with it than we are doing. Dan /--------------------------------\ /--------------------------------\ | Daniel Jacobowitz |__| SCS Class of 2002 | | Debian GNU/Linux Developer __ Carnegie Mellon University | | dan@debian.org | | dmj+@andrew.cmu.edu | \--------------------------------/ \--------------------------------/
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