On Jan 15, 2007, at 12:39 AM, Christian Perrier wrote:
Quoting Rick Thomas ([EMAIL PROTECTED]):
It's sad to see d-i on powerpc, a major architectural variant, being
eroded and neglected as a result of a few people who can't get past
their own personal animosity to Sven. Whatever his merits or
demerits -- and I'm not going to get drawn into a debate on that
topic -- the powerpc architecture deserves better than it's seen
recently.
Can you give us examples of actions from the D-I team who could be
used as illustrations of negligence towards the powerpc architecture
users?
Well, OK:
The one that particularly got to me was the very long dry spell for
OldWorld PowerMacs during which etch would not boot on that
hardware. Sarge ran fine, but until the advent of the 2.6.18 series
of kernels, etch never got much beyond the bootloader(*). This
resulted in "genetic drift" of applications software (specifically
gstreamer is the one I know about. There are probably others.)
because it couldn't be tested. The result is that now there's a very
subtle release critical bug (#404876) and no time to fix it.
As Mathew just pointed out: Kernels not booting may not be d-i's
fault, but it is their problem.
The underlying problem was that the infighting in the d-i team
distracted the in-fighters from taking bug reports on this topic
seriously. If Debian on powerpc hardware is to survive, the
infighting problem has to be solved. You can blame other people all
you want, but it won't solve the problem.
I don't expect the people this is about to understand what I'm
talking about here. They are blinded by their own hatred, thus
unable to see the larger problem.
The powerpc architecture deserves better than it's seen recently.
Rick
*) Bootloader == BootX in my case. I tried miboot as well, and it
booted with a differently configured kernel, but when it came time to
reboot into the production kernel, I got the same results -- nothing
beyond the bootloader messages.
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