On Fri, 10 Sep 2010 14:17:50 -0400 (EDT), Matthijs Kooijman wrote:
On Wed, 8 Sep 2010 00:10:19 +0200, Matthijs Kooijman wrote:
I'm a Debian Maintainer who is having some problems with a package
(grfcode) on s390. Can you get me access to a porter box so I can try to
fix the problems?
Never mind, we've managed to test this in an emulator already.
Sorry for the slow response. Frans Pop, one of the s390 porters,
and the one who monitored this list most closely, died recently.
(See http://www.debian.org/News/2010/20100831.) It will no doubt
take the Debian s390 port some time to recover from his loss.
Since Debian is an all-volunteer organization, and since we have
no corporate sponsorship from IBM for system z, IBM System z servers are
hard to come by for the Debian project. (Not too many private individuals
have a 64-bit mainframe in their basements.) Frans himself used
the Hercules emulator running under Linux on an Intel box, I believe,
to do his work, and I suspect (but do not know for certain) that
the production build servers do as well. Frans was doing the
daily builds of the squeeze Debian installer for the s390 platform
himself, the last I knew. I just tried the link myself:
http://people.debian.org/~fjp/d-i/s390/images/daily/ and got a
"404 - not found" error; so we have no more daily builds. That
issue needs to be addressed.
I have access to a real IBM mainframe owned by my employer, and I
can sometimes test things for Debian, if it is in my employer's
interests to do so; but I am not in a position to offer a "porter
box" to Debian. It doesn't belong to me. I run Debian for s390
in a virtual machine under z/VM; so if there's anything VM-specific
that needs tested, I might be able to help.