Porting packages to sparc
Hi,
There is currently a number of packages which fail to build on sparc
simply because sparc is not mentioned in the architecture list in
debian/control. Usually it means that either the upstream does not
support sparc arch, or maintainer decided that it's not worth supporting
it. It is up to the porters (that is, us) to decide whether the package is
portable, or it should be just left alone and added to the
packages-arch-specific (p-a-s) file [1], so that it is never considered
for building on sparc.
I have went through the packages which are currently in the Maybe-Failed
state [0], and compiled a list of candidates for inclusion into p-a-s, as
well as a list of packages which currently fail to build, but might be
portable. Both lists are presented below. There are some questions in
them, which I could not answer quickly myself. I would like to invite
anyone interested in sparc porting to work on these problems. That
includes contacting maintainers/upstream to figure out the current status
on sparc, evaluating and discussing the complexity of the porting tasks,
and actual porting, if it proves to be feasible.
Should (most probably) be in p-a-s:
libopenspc sparc not in arch list. Major parts written in i386
assembler.
xmms-openspc Depends on libopenspc.
hdaps-utils sparc not in arch list. Utilities specific for IBM
ThinkPad laptops.
nvidia-xconfig sparc not in arch list. NVIDIA X configuration tools,
probably only useful on machines with NVIDIA proprietary
driver, which is not available on sparc.
ogre-contrib sparc not in arch list. Depends on NVIDIA Cg Toolkit
(proprietary, not available on sparc).
nvidia-cg-toolkit Installer for proprietary NVIDIA software, not available
for sparc.
libsmbios Access to BIOS, useful only in PC arches?
atokx2 sparc not in arch list. Installer for non-free Japanese
input method, not available for sparc.
mesa-legacy sparc not in arch list. Hardware-accelerated rendering
capabilities for 3DFX-based graphics cards. Useful on sparc?
apcidump sparc not in arch list. Utility to dump ACPI tables.
Specific to PC architectures?
hotkey-setup sparc not in arch list. Setup of hotkeys on PC laptops.
php4-maxdb PHP module for access to MaxDB database, which is
currently supported on PC arches only.
Probably can be ported (anybody interested?):
llvm 'Unsupported architecture' during configure run.
A collection of libraries and tool that makes it
easy to build compilers, etc.
gsnes9x sparc not in arch list (why?). Depends on non-free
snes9x-x, which is Arch: any.
kexec-tools 'unsupported architecture sparc' during configure
run. Tool to load a kernel in memory and reboot into
the kernel loaded in memory. Support for sparc might
be pending upstream (see bug 338846).
dfsbuild sparc not in the arch list. Build script for Debian
From Scratch. Probably needs to be taught how to make
a sparc bootable CD.
libaio sparc not in arch list. Library for kernel asynchronous
I/O system calls.
lcrash sparc not in arch list. Kernel patch and utilities required
to produce and analyze kernel crash dump.
adeos sparc not in arch list. A kernel patch implementing a
nanokernel for sharing of hw resources. Too hard (?).
grub2 sparc not in arch list. Portable? Jeff Bailey was working
on it some time ago, I think.
odyssey sparc not in arch list. Utility for programming PIC micro-
controllers through a parallel type programmer.
gwp sparc not in arch list. A VGA Planets game client for GNOME.
Why in contrib?
cacao 'sparc systems not supported' during configure. Free
Java virtual machine.
qemu Probably portable. I've made some progress with it, patches
were posted to upstream mailing list. Needs further work.
lcd4linux Fails with 'unknown opcode `rep'' during build. Has
some arch-specific asm? Program to display info on
the external LCD display. Any sparc which needs it?
[0] http://buildd.debian.org/~jeroen/status/architecture.php?a=sparc
[1] http://buildd.debian.org/quinn-diff/Packages-arch-specific
Best regards,
Jurij Smakov jurij@wooyd.org
Key: http://www.wooyd.org/pgpkey/ KeyID: C99E03CC
P.S. Now that I've written it, it occured to me that it would be nice
to have this list in the wiki somewhere, to keep track of the issues.
Anybody interested in putting it there?
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