[Debootloaders-miboot] Proposal for continued development

Tue Sep 26 19:05:08 UTC 2006

On Sep 26, 2006, at 10:18 AM, Aurélien GÉRÔME wrote:

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

I would have done so earlier if it were possible; however, it was not, 
for a rather varied list of reasons, including the fact that I was 
unaware of exactly what may have been discussed without my 
participation. Such reasons are unimportant now that I have made this 
contact.

> 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.

When I was reading the archives of this list a short time ago, I was 
unaware that anyone else brought up to speed on the progress made in 
the course of that exchange. It unexpectedly saves me from having to 
reiterate its content in greater detail, at least as far as you 
personally are concerned. I have no idea who else may have been privy 
to the text of the discussion, but feel free to give copies of it to 
whomever else is involved, upon Sven and Piotr's consent.

>> 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. :)

I did read most of the archives, but skipped over a few messages that 
seemed to be solely related to rsrce. I did not see a specific 
TODO-list anywhere in there. Using BenH's last miBoot as a base was an 
idea that I had in 2002, but upon closer examination, I decided it 
would be more worthwhile to use Jeff Carr's modification of that 
version, and I then began to look for some kind of archive where I 
could find the source to it. I later wrongly concluded this was not 
possible and made no progress until, at the end of 2004, I stumbled 
onto that source along with Etsushi Kato's modifications to it. I 
believe porting Etsushi Kato's version is the way to go, as i have 
hinted all along. Porting BenH's last miBoot is at least a far better 
idea than anything that would involve the early versions Sven used to 
use. If that's what has already begun, then no effort has been wasted, 
because practically any adaptation that would apply to that version 
would also apply to the EK version.

> 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?

Pretty much, yes. The Apple boot block that BenH threw in would be 
perfectly omittable in doing so. That might very well still not be free 
enough for alioth, but I'm not aware of any compelling reason for 
alioth to specifically be the central point of SVN development for this 
project, other than the need to use the same SVN repo for both branches 
to promote the sharing of code already freed, and the fact that the SVN 
repo is already on alioth. I would have preferred to have settled this 
concern, which I had from the beginning, prior to setting up SVN, but I 
did not get the opportunity.

> 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. :)

I agree with your disagreement, because that indeed makes very little 
sense conceptually and would be full of problems in practice. However, 
I think it could still serve as a reasonable shortcut while the project 
is just getting off the ground. Obviously, it wouldn't be especially 
practical to have Piotr commit patches, me build the binary, and then 
Sven test the binary I built with Piotr's patches, although that would 
be an example of what advantage a distributed development model could 
still bring to the table. In any case, the arrangement would only 
persist during an indefinite transitional period, which would end after 
ALL the existing functional code is freed, and any further improvements 
may be freely made to the freed version without even needing to refer 
to the legacy builds. Indeed, CWPro4 is different from the toolchain I 
have set up, which is a collage of CWPro5 (fortuitously obtained with 
difficulty through eBay), additional patches and components from 
Metrowerks, stuff from Apple, and various other additions and tweaks, 
primarily very tangential to the strict purpose of building nothing but 
miBoot, but it has the advantage that it happens to work at the given 
moment without requiring further investigation as to what's going 
wrong. The need for this is exemplified by both the horribly broken 
binary Etsushi Kato built from his perfectly sound patch, and the still 
unidentified brokenness BenH introduced to BootX 1.2.1 by upgrading 
from CWPro4 to CWPro5, thus necessitating the hasty throwing together 
of another CWPro4 for the purpose of providing 1.2.2 as a last-second 
solution. I only needed to make relatively cosmetic changes to the 
Etsushi Kato source release to get it to build properly, which I 
determined by attempting to build the Jeff Carr version from source and 
diffing the result against the stock binary until I was able to produce 
one that was virtually identical, and then applying the adjustments 
that revealed to be necessary to the Etsushi Kato version. I doubt it 
would be acceptable to the affected parties for me to distribute copies 
of the CWPro5 discs that I have while I keep mine. In summary, there is 
definitely work to be done here, and there is definitely plenty of room 
for everybody to play large roles in it, regardless of what path we 
take.

> 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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