Hello kFreeBSD porters! I've been working on an updated util-linux package and the result is currently available in experimental.
I've previously contacted the patch authors for kfreebsd-related patches in the util-linux package, but I'm now reaching out to the wider kfreebsd community in hope to get some response. The background is that the Debian util-linux package maintainers do not have the resources to carry the burden of maintaining things on their own and backing themselves into a corner has resulted in updating the util-linux package in debian has become a gigantic hurdle to overcome. This has resulted in no updates being done for years despite a large number of bugs being found (and fixed upstream). I've worked hard on sorting out many of the problems and are now reaching out to you for help with the kfreebsd-specific bits. On the kfreebsd side we have three main issues to deal with... First, for the record there are many testsuite failures on kfreebsd. Some probably quite obvious but the silent failure of creating sunlabel looks scary in my eyes. I'm not going to make passing the testsuite a strict requirement but would be preferrable. The short term issue is that since fsck now depends on libmount which has not been ported to anything but linux so far it is not built in the new package on non-linux platforms. I've created a "proof of concept" set of patches to make it possible to build fsck on kfreebsd again. This is done by mostly gutting libmount to disable all the mount bits in it and while I've tried to make the patches as small as possible, I hope people can see that this is likely something that could become very problematic to keep alive if we don't get an upstream effort going ... In other words, I'm not willing to maintain these patches! My patches are available at: https://people.debian.org/~ah/ul-kfreebsd-fsck/ This leads us into the long term issue. The kfreebsd porters needs to get an upstream effort going to have upstream util-linux buildable on kfreebsd. (The Debian Hurd porters have already/always done their part.) The current package still contains a bunch of kfreebsd patches to make it build. I've asked the people listed as patch authors to follow the procedure to get their patches forwarded upstream but I haven't heard anything back so far. It would be very helpful if someone would be willing to look at the current patch set to make sure the rebased versions look good and are still relevant to know which parts should be forwarded upstream and which parts can just be dropped. You'll also need to investigate the possibility of getting the original authors of the patches to sign off on them, and as a back up investigate if upstream has a strict requirement for patches to be signed off or if you can just redo the work of porting util-linux yourself. (See "developer certificate of origin" for more info if you're not familiar with Signed-off-by...) If I can't find anyone interested in working on these issues future versions of util-linux will probably no longer ship /sbin/fsck on kfreebsd (and if the existing patchset becomes problematic for some reason the package might stop building completely on this arch). The current work is available in collab-maint git at: http://anonscm.debian.org/cgit/collab-maint/pkg-util-linux.git/ (See the debian-2.25 branch or newer...) Regards, Andreas Henriksson -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-bsd-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: https://lists.debian.org/20140804111224.ga32...@fatal.se