Re: [Gnewsense-dev] [bug #38001] Kernel metapackages (linux-latest-2.6) refer to missing Debian kernel versions

[Sam Geeraerts]

Op Thu, 3 Jan 2013 13:26:15 +0100
schreef Marek Buras <address@hidden>:

> On Thu, Jan 03, 2013 at 08:16:53PM +1100, Karl Goetz wrote:
> > Its a common chipset, hopefully you can bully it in to line :)
> 
> Unfortunatelly this driver is blacklisted, because for one of chips
> (8169D) firmware loader has been introduced. I try to understand all
> the patches (related to 8169) applied by Debian. Have to look deeper
> inside it. Maybe comparison with recent linux-libre will give me some
> hints.

André Silva commented in the bug report that he got it to work with
just a few tweaks. I haven't had time to look at it yet. If you want to
work on this, you can often find him in #gnewsense to talk to him about
it.

> > Ideally all packages we change would have one (and I guess all that
> > we create; though iirc we have something doco'd about that).

We have 2 wiki pages about packaging [1], [2]. They should get cleaned
up, updated and possibly merged.

> > I don't know if we have a template for README.gNewSense but it would
> > probably be worth having a template in our wiki with a few example
> > headings to get people on the right track which can be referenced
> > by our packaging documents.

I haven't kept to a particular form. Some are plain text (e.g.
linux-2.6), for some I used a little bit of markup to make it look
prettier (e.g. linux-latest-2.6).

Sometimes someone comes along and asks what the difference between
Debian and gNewSense is. We should have a wiki page that lists our
changes. I was thinking we could use README.gNewSense files to generate
that automatically if we use a structured format (e.g. control file
style) for it. E.g. for linux-2.6:

Changed-From-Debian: Deblobbed
Developer-Notes: Initially, Debian's pristine source was deblobbed with the 
 tools provided by GNU Linux-libre (see debian/bin/liberate.sh). While 
 Debian's source doesn't change we can use that as our pristine source.
 .
 To update the package, do as follows:
 - Import new changelog entries, bump latest version with "gnewsense1" and
   change "stable" to "parkes".
 - Import new patch files.

The wiki page would be something like:

||Source package||Change||Reason||
||linux-2.6||Modified||Deblobbed||
||ndiswrapper||Removed||Only useful with non-free software||

We could also refer to this page for the package comparison field in
our census page [3].

Opinions?

> Okay. Maybe it would be useful to have list of modified packages to
> check? For my system I did: 
>   dpkg -l | grep "gnewsense[1-9]" | awk '{print $2 " ver. " $3}'
> and it gave me under 40 items (including some TeX stuff). Such a list
> could be easily published somewhere (wiki?). What do you think?

You can see the list of modified source packages using the VCS web
front-end [4]. I should make an mr [5] config file for it and keep it
there too. Trouble is that I always forget to update it when I create a
new branch.

[1] http://gnewsense.org/Building_A_deb_Package
[2] http://gnewsense.org/kgoetz/FSDGPackageRebuild
[3] http://wiki.debian.org/Derivatives/Census/gNewSense
[4] http://bzr.savannah.gnu.org/lh/gnewsense/packages-parkes/
[5] http://packages.debian.org/squeeze/mr