Bug#693400: please allow multiarch for grub-ieee1275-bin

Daniel Kahn Gillmor dkg at fifthhorseman.net
Fri Nov 16 04:06:35 UTC 2012


Package: grub-ieee1275-bin
Version: 2.00-7

I would like to be able to install grub's powerpc-ieee1275 to a USB
stick from a non-powerpc platform.  I'm working from i386.

I think this ought to be possible using debian's multiarch capabilities,
especially since grub-ieee1275-bin just installs a pack of .mod and .lst
files in /usr/lib/grub.

However, grub-ieee1275-bin:powerpc pulls in a bunch of powerpc
executables, and it also conflicts with grub-ieee1275-bin:i386, so i
can't have them both concurrently installed (i don't have hardware that
can make use of the i386 package, but it seems in principle reasonable
that someone might want both architectures available).

In short i'd like to be able to do something like this from any platform:

 dpkg --add-architecture powerpc
 apt-get update
 apt-get install grub-ieee1275-bin:powerpc
 parted /dev/sdx mktable mac
 parted /dev/sdx mkpart grub 4MiB 30MiB
 parted /dev/sdx set 2 boot on
 mkfs.hfs -h /dev/sdx2
 mount /dev/sdx2 /mnt
 grub-install --target=powerpc-ieee1275 --root-directory=/mnt --no-nvram
 umount /mnt

And end up with a sdx being a bootable USB stick with grub for
powerpc-ieee1275 on it.

I think all that's needed to make grub-ieee1275-bin multiarch is to move
the Depends: powerpc-ibm-utils, powerpc-utils, bc to Recommends: for
non-powerpc architectures.  Do we actually need bc in there on any
architecture, since powerpc-ibm-utils itself depends on bc?

It would also be nice to have grub-install default to --no-nvram on
non-powerpc architectures, when targetting powerpc-ieee1275, since
clearly this would be a cross-platform installation of the bootloader.

fwiw, the above series seems to actually work today, with the exception
of some failures when using apt (e.g. #693395) and the replacement of
bc:i386 with bc:powerpc.

	--dkg

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