[Debootloaders-miboot] Proposal for continued development

[Aurélien GÉRÔME]

Hi Daniel,

I was planning to contact you at some point in the future, it is nice
you did it first. :)

On Tue, Sep 26, 2006 at 09:09:58AM -0700, Daniel Gimpelevich wrote:
> Hello. I was just alerted to the existence of this list, and have now 
> subscribed. To refresh you (the subscribers) on some of my views on the 
> matter it concerns, I refer you to the following thread, especially the 
> first message:
> 
> http://lists.debian.org/debian-powerpc/2006/03/msg00091.html
> 
> That message also references two all-important earlier messages, but 
> through mail-archive.com, which seems to have disappeared. Here are 
> alternate links to those messages:
> 
> http://article.gmane.org/gmane.linux.ports.ppc.nubus-pmac.users/220
> 
> http://article.gmane.org/gmane.linux.ports.ppc.nubus-pmac.users/409
> 
> There was one more subsequent relevant message:
> 
> http://article.gmane.org/gmane.linux.ports.ppc.nubus-pmac.users/893

I read all this when I read the private mails exchange between you,
Piotr, and Sven.

> Also following the thread on debian-powerpc, the discussion continued 
> off-list concerning mainly technical details, until it was finally 
> reduced to a brief exchange only between Piotr and myself, concluding 
> with a message from me to him letting him know that he found the means 
> by which the goals outlined in my February message above may be 
> achieved in a way that could mesh with the task of "freeing" miBoot. I

Okay, so this is the exchange I read. ;)

> propose establishing a separate, for-the-time-being nonfree SVN branch 
> of miBoot and BootX that would initially focus on the tasks enumerated 
> in my February message, pursuing a path that would eventually converge 
> with the one the current branch takes. That way, the development 
> process may be "multi-threaded" to a greater degree. Any thoughts?

What we want to achieve in the Debootloaders project is to port
miBoot on the GNU toolchain and to strip the non-free or IP-protected
bits. These are steps which are necessary to finally be able to
integrate it officially in Debian and consequently to use it at the
Debian-Installer stage. Have you read the mailing-list archives at
[1]? There, you will see our TODO-list and what tasks we enroll
to perform. For the time being, we only want to port Benjamin
Herrenschmidt's last miBoot without adding new features, because
there is already a lot of work on that task. :)

We already have a SVN at [2], so it might be possible. However,
it depends on what you want to commit. :) If I understood clearly
your mails on the nubus-pmac-users mailing-list, you want to setup
everything to be able to build your (Jeff Carr + Etsushi Kato) miBoot
fork with a CWPro version you can provide?

I am quoting you from [3]:

  Also, it would be necessary to standardize a build environment
  to prevent the kind of breakage present in EK's binary. IMO, one
  of the easiest ways to do that would be to designate exactly one
  person to be the only person ever to compile the code, with all
  the changes everybody makes. I hereby volunteer to be that person.

I disagree on that, I would like to be able to build it too, so maybe
you can provide instructions and the necessary non-free software
to build it? I have a copy of CWPro4, but surely not the same as
yours. Otherwise, I fail to see what a distributed development model
will bring to us. :)

Cheers,

[1] <http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/debootloaders-miboot/>
[2] <http://svn.debian.org/wsvn/debootloaders/trunk/miboot/>
[3] <http://article.gmane.org/gmane.linux.ports.ppc.nubus-pmac.users/220>
-- 
 .''`.   Aurélien GÉRÔME
: :'  :
`. `'`   Free Software Developer
  `-     Unix Sys & Net Admin
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