sparc status? A cry for information, and an offer to help

[Jules Bean <jmlb2@hermes.cam.ac.uk>]

Hi all.

There seem to be quite a few problems with the sparc port, and I'm more
than happy to help - but this list seems to be almost dead.  No one with
an 'air of authority' is around here...

I see the following problems with my SS2:

1) The boot disks don't work.  Not an issue for me, but important to some
people.

2) tftpboot.img has to be null-padded to work.

3) 'ldd' doesn't work - and possibly other components of ld-linux.so.
Random segfaults are probably related to this. This makes packaged
compilation tricky, since dpkg-shlibs won't work.

4) There are problems with the virtual console/X code.  X sometimes
'steals' a vc for no apparent reason.  Sometimes keymaps get messed up
too.

5) We have no libg++272 - which means that we can't compile some
packages, notable menu.

6) zsh segfaults (!! - maybe this is problem 3 reincarnated)


So, I think there are some things we could do with here.

I would like to see a debian-sparc web page, and a debian-sparc FAQ.  I
will happily put these together.

I would like to know where I'm suppose to report architecture bugs like 1)
and 2).  boot-floppies?  But presumably the boot-floppies maintainer is an
i386 person...

I would like to know who put together our current libc6 support and ldso
support.  Presumably 3) above belongs to one of these, and it may even be
upstream, for all I know...

But it's very quiet in here...

Cheers,

Jules

/----------------+-------------------------------+---------------------\
|  Jelibean aka  | jules@jellybean.co.uk         |  6 Evelyn Rd	       |
|  Jules aka     | jules@debian.org              |  Richmond, Surrey   |
|  Julian Bean   | jmlb2@hermes.cam.ac.uk        |  TW9 2TF *UK*       |
+----------------+-------------------------------+---------------------+
|  War doesn't demonstrate who's right... just who's left.             |
|  When privacy is outlawed... only the outlaws have privacy.          |
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