Hello! On 9/1/20 9:14 AM, Paul Wise wrote: > You could donate powerpc hardware so that Debian can do various tests > on powerpc, for example package tests and reproducible builds tests. > > https://ci.debian.net/ > https://tests.reproducible-builds.org/debian/reproducible.html
Actually, that wouldn't really be necessary as all the IBM POWER machines we have in Debian can operate in bi-endian mode. In fact, the POWER machine that IBM donated to Debian Ports for the big-endian PowerPC ports is running a little-endian Debian Buster. The KVM virtual machines for the buildd and porterbox are running in big-endian mode. > You could work on fixing build failures on powerpc: > > https://udd.debian.org/cgi-bin/ftbfs.cgi?arch=powerpc Ah, didn't know UDD had an FTBFS section, handy. FWIW, both 64-bit and 32-bit big-endian PowerPC are in very good shape these days with the IBM folks maintaining the toolchain for both 32-bit and 64-bit PowerPC. While the 32-bit parts of the kernel are probably less maintained due to the fact that there is hardly any new hardware coming, the IBM kernel developers are still touch the code and making changes and if something breaks they also usually fix it. So, from the technical point of view, it wouldn't be a problem to make both "powerpc" and "ppc64" release architectures (unlike sparc64, for example) since we have sufficient and new server hardware available and the large majority of binary packages build fine on both architectures (over 13,000 packages). The only major things that are missing are NodeJS, Chrome and Golang and that's mainly because these upstream projects outright refuse to support anything that they don't consider mainstream. > You could work on powerpc-specific bug reports: > > https://udd.debian.org/cgi-bin/[email protected]&tag=powerpc > https://udd.debian.org/cgi-bin/[email protected]&tag=powerpc > > You could help maintain the powerpc wiki/web pages: > > https://www.debian.org/ports/powerpc/ > https://wiki.debian.org/PowerPC > > You could help maintain the general ports wiki/web pages: > > https://www.debian.org/ports/ > https://wiki.debian.org/Ports > > You could help Debian more generally: > > https://www.debian.org/intro/help Good ideas! I concur! >> we can't just share our deb packages, or could we? > > If you're rebuilding security updates there isn't any Debian suite > where they could be uploaded as Debian ports doesn't have support for > stable or security support. There is potential for the unofficial ports > to get releases, but that requires lots of Debian infrastructure work. Yes, we would need our own proper instance of DAK (Debian Archive Kit) first as opposed to Mini-DAK. And then we would need an instance of the Britney service which is responsible for testing support among other things. Adrian -- .''`. John Paul Adrian Glaubitz : :' : Debian Developer - [email protected] `. `' Freie Universitaet Berlin - [email protected] `- GPG: 62FF 8A75 84E0 2956 9546 0006 7426 3B37 F5B5 F913
