Re: M68K boot floppies / CDs
Michael Schmitz <schmitz@mail.biophys.uni-duesseldorf.de> writes:
> > My customers want m68k r4 CDs and they want them NOW. Please take whatever
> > action is necessary to provide them ASAP.
>
> Sorry, but as you will no doubt be aware, Debian is a volunteer project,
> and the m68k port in particular is a very small team (four or five
> maintainers, primarily occupied with finishing potato). 'NOW' isn't going
> to happen, and 'ASAP' might take a while.
The grief is justified to some extent, since I probably gave Anne the
impression that the images would be appearing before the New Year, but
I have been very busy over the last couple of weeks (partly with my
Company's financial year end, partly with paying customers, but mostly
endeavoring to kill as many of my brain cells as possible, what with
Xmas & Y2K parties :-)
> > See threads
> > http://www.debian.org/Lists-Archives/debian-68k-9912/msg00056.html
> > and
> > http://www.debian.org/Lists-Archives/debian-68k-9912/msg00087.html
>
> See other posts on that topic here; I've tried a last minute build of
> boot-floppies for slink r4 which failed because the only machine I could
> build on was a potato installation, and I re-uploaded the boot-floppies
> update originally done for r1 or r2. Please refer to the later messages in
> the thread you refered to.
>
> I also gave Phil a rundown on how to create an up-to-date disks-m68k tree
> by merging parts of the 0606 tree into 0301.
I was tempted to follow your instructions (and actually did so, except
that I misinterpreted them, got frustrated, and gave up).
I've since concluded that I'm better off waiting for the archive to be
put in a state where it produces valid CDs (i.e. only one set of boot
floppies would be good), before I try to declare anything I produce as
valid or official.
You can take this as a statement of policy as far as official CD
production is concerned (it might only be my personal policy, but
since I currently own cdimage.debian.org you can draw your own
conclusions).
I do endeavour to either be around when a release happens, or make
sure someone else can produce CDs, but one's enthusiasm for production
of CDs does tend to drop off rather when the wasted hours start to
mount up, and when problems are reported and remain unfixed for weeks
it's not too surprising if I end up thinking ``Well, if they don't
care, then why should I?''
Obviously, I realise that people have been attempting to fix the m68k
problems, but we are definitely not managing to pass on the sense of
urgency to whoever it is that should be sorting this out in the
archive.
I reported a bug against ftp.debian.org (#53683), but I was a little
surprised to find that I actually needed to, since I'd have thought
that one of the m68k crew would have beaten me to it.
To summarise, if you want CDs for your architecture, do whatever
it takes to get the archive into a valid state, tell me you've done
it, grab a copy of the CD once I've made it, and tell me it works.
Then I'll sign the MD5SUMS and we can all get on with something useful.
BTW, if the ftpmasters want to give me the go-ahead, I'll fix the
disks-m68k directory on master myself.
Cheers, Phil.
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