Craig, Hi - see below ------------>
On Mon March 28 2011 10:34:01 Craig Prescott wrote: > Robert Garron wrote: > > All I need is direction as to what to do, when to do (now), and who to > > contact (our growing list - but who in Debian land to contact). I do > > appreciate your provided list of contacts - I hope they all respond to > > our call to have Alpha Squeeze... > > I want to thank you for starting this thread. I'm catching up a little > bit, but I think you are asking about what would be required to > recertify Alpha as a release architecture in Debian. Is that correct? Yes, that was the initial question... > > I do not know what would be involved in the recertification of Alpha as > a release architecture for Debian. I'd be very interested to find out > the answer. Me too. > > I do not know who in Debian to contact regarding the status of official > or semi-offical support for the Alpha architecture in Debian. > Presumably, there is a forum within the Debian community for discussion > of a port's health, viability, etc. The debian-alpha list was part of > the discussion back in 2009 re: Squeeze, but I'm not sure what other > forums were involved. I guess I have some research to perform... As I did not follow the "systems side of Debian" as I am a systems integrator and was more interested in all of the various components (packages available and updated to the latest releases). Thus I was totally unaware from the forums that posted that Alpha was being dropped... someone sent us a page that was available in 2009 to this effect, but I obviously missed that one... > > It may be useful to contact Steve Langasek, who was the Port Maintainter > and a heavy lifter for the Lenny release on Alpha. He may be able to > point us in the right direction for contacts. This is what Bill Parke stated also - so I will try this tomorrow. > > FWIW, though, I don't think we're going to get far asking Debian > leadership about a *Squeeze* release on Alpha. I think that ship sailed > in 2009. Is that really what you meant? IMO, if there really is > interest and resources that can be committed to official or > semi-official support of Debian on Alpha, it would be better to look > beyond Squeeze. OK -- from my note directly to you -- if that is what we should do, then we should look that way -- as it is estimated that the project can take about 6 months? > > > Anyway, What should our next steps be? > > > > What my group has to offer a Debian Alpha group is: > > Three (3) almost fully loaded working 4100's with HSC's and fully loaded > > bays. Five (5) 2100's and one (1) DS20 (older model, unfortunately the > > motherboard has an issue that has not been fixed yet - Joel's company can > > fix this -- we just have not done it yet) > > and another ~10 Alpha's of various sorts. The above are the real working > > units. > > > > Plan - I guess we need to finalize the list of people who can help, > > exchange contacts, setup systems to perform the work, and ask Debian if > > they can provided all of the past tools they have used to create a > > release... Maybe Debian can provide a CD with a HowTo to setup a distro > > creation environment? We can mount that so our new group can have full > > access. I guess we should also setup git or subversion for source code > > control etc... I am probably getting ahead of myself here as the group > > should decide how to proceed upon its formation... > > I think these are good starting thoughts. I also have resources which I > can contribute, if they are useful > (http://www.alphalinux.org/wiki/index.php/User:Prescott is still about > right). > > I'll make a few notes/thoughts below that may be of some use. > > I never created installation media for my own build of Squeeze packages > on alpha. It was on my list, but I haven't gotten around to figuring > out the "Debian way" to do it (that was a goal of mine). > > To build Debian packages for the alpha architecture - in the full-blown > Debian way - a wanna-build server, buildd machine(s), and an apt > repository will be needed. As the world seems to be moving to git -- to replace subversion, I guess that would be the source control system of choice to setup ? > One or more humans will be needed to > digitally sign the debian packages and review the logs of failed builds > (and do something about them). This is the time consuming stuff - and this is where a well run team needs to be assembled for such work. > When the human(s) sign the packages, > they can be uploaded to the apt repository. In Debian-speak, I believe > the humans in the above are referred to as "buildd-admins". Those > humans would need to be identified. OK - a job yet to be done .... > > The wanna-build server need not be an alpha, but the buildd machines > would need to be (obviously). I would want to use an Alpha because it seems that less work would be required to release? And with limited resources of all areas (time, man power, systems etc... ) it would make sense to start with a plan that looks at stream lining work loads... > > Information regarding how to set up a wanna-build and buildd is on the > net. FWIW, I tried to document the setup I used to build squeeze for > alpha here: > > http://www.ekkaia.net/~cpp/blog/?p=9 I will read this tomorrow and get back to you shortly. > > After processing the enormous backlog of packages (14,000 or so, I > think), I hovered around 97 or 98 percent of packages in the distro > built and uploaded. There were always some which gave trouble, that I > didn't care about (think mono-related packages and the like). I think we will have to make decisions as to what is built and debugged. It is simple as that -- > > For the building of squeeze packages, I did not find the operation of > the buildd machines to be terribly time consuming (at most I used three > buildds - 2x CS20 and a UP1100, but I was starting from scratch and in > no hurry). I usually signed and uploaded blobs of packages once or > twice a day. On occasion I worked up patches or incorporated existing > ones into Debian packages - but this was fairly rare, and mostly related > to installation-media-only packages (and I never produced installation > media). I'm sure the lack of problems I experienced was greatly helped > by the alpha maintainers and Debian developers who kept the Alpha > version of unstable going strong. For the buildd machines, I found it > was better to have machines with drives larger than 9GB (system+chroot > space) - I could get into trouble space-wise if I did not upload often > enough. This is why I called Joel about disks -- we have an HSC system with 30/40 36 gig drives and we are going to upgrade to 300's OR if Joel can make the tera byte drives work -- well then we have alot of storage to get all of this to work... > > As I understand, the Debian-speak for the role of the humans who kept > the active versions of packages working on a particular architecture is > "porter". I think it is not a problem for a "buildd-admin" and a > "porter" can be the same human. But from Debian's perspective, I don't > see how a one-man port can be viable long term. Absolutely -- this is why I am trying to find the last die-hards like myself to help. My feeling is that Alphas were made to last, and in some cases (application level) I have had Alphas beat out newer Dell/Intel and IBM systems for a particular app... why -- overall architecture - end to end design -- yes the processors of new are faster, but the I/O, memory, buses etc sometimes are slower... And of course I am nostalgic to the Alphas... > > For the apt repository, I used reprepro. IIRC, this is not what the > official repositories use, though. But after living with it for a > while, it seems very nice, and documentation is ubiquitous. There > should be a backup for the apt repository. I used an md mirror for my > main repository and backed it up to another machine (also with an md > mirror). If uploading into official Debian repos, this is probably all > taken care of, I'd guess(?). The size of my apt repository for alpha > squeeze packages is about 30GB. OK - well with all of the initial volunteers we are off to a good start -- Now we simply need to get organized, and start to make a project plan with assignments -- this will all happen in the next two weeks? > > Cheers, > Craig -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [email protected] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [email protected] Archive: http://lists.debian.org/[email protected]
