Re: Future of kFreeBSD in Debian unstable

2018-01-08 Thread Yavor Doganov
В Mon, 08 Jan 2018 12:32:33 +0100, Ansgar Burchardt написа:
> But we would need people to commit to that: someone has to address
> issues that arise (these do not have to be Debian Developers, though
> ports should have at least some Debian Developers commit to them);

I'm not qualified to work on the toolchain and don't have special
sysadmin skills that are probably needed for a buildd maintainer.
However, I can work on bugs in specific packages with a certain degree
of stubbornness.  My impression is that the majority of GNU/kFreeBSD
bugs are fairly trivial to fix like this one:

https://sources.debian.org/src/terminal.app/0.9.9-1/debian/patches/FTBFS-
kFreeBSD/

I first installed GNU/kFreeBSD some time after the first installation
instructions became available, but couldn't get it to boot.  I made a
fresh reinstall following #593898.  I felt guilty for losing Axel
Beckert's time so went on and installed kfreebsd-i386 on one of my
machines.  I had to buy a LAN card as mine wasn't supported by the
kernel.  I couldn't use it as my main workstation but that was mostly
because the machine was rather old and slow.  I used it regularly for
several years to test packages (mostly GNUstep) until the HDD died.

Contrary to most people, my interest is philosophical, not technical.

> however with the kFreeBSD buildds gone, we would also need at least some
> people willing to maintain buildds (this is limited to Debian Developers
> as long as the port lives on ftp.debian.org).

As kfreebsd-* are probably never going to to be release architectures
due to systemd, maybe it is better to move the port to debian-ports.

At some point, it was evident that much more people were engaged with
GNU/kFreeBSD compared to GNU/Hurd.  It is bewildering why human
resources have been in short supply lately.

> Currently no architecture-dependent packages get updated for kFreeBSD;

That's the beginning of the end, unfortunately.  If the port is moved
elsewhere, does it have to be bootstrapped again or the wanna-build
database can be reused?



Re: Future of kFreeBSD in Debian unstable

2018-01-08 Thread Ansgar Burchardt
Hi,

Gianluca Bonetti writes:
> I think it is a project worth keeping alive, even if not 100% workable.
> Dumping it away is a great waste of previous and precious work on
> portability and kernel abstraction.
> kFreeBSD 7 was stable enough to be used as desktop, as I did on a secondary
> box, real hardware.

It certainly would be nice if the kfreebsd port would be kept alive; I
find it an interesting project myself.

But we would need people to commit to that: someone has to address
issues that arise (these do not have to be Debian Developers, though
ports should have at least some Debian Developers commit to them);
however with the kFreeBSD buildds gone, we would also need at least some
people willing to maintain buildds (this is limited to Debian Developers
as long as the port lives on ftp.debian.org).

Currently no architecture-dependent packages get updated for kFreeBSD;
updates to architecture-independent (arch: all) packages will eventually
be incompatible with those old versions and more and more packages will
no longer be installable.  I don't believe it is worth keeping a port on
ftp.d.o in this state (snapshot.d.o will provide historic packages that
might be helpful if someone wants to restart the effort in the future).

Ansgar