Re: [PATCH 00/41] The x86_64 port

[Sergey Bugaev]

Hello,

On Wed, May 10, 2023 at 3:55 AM Samuel Thibault <samuel.thibault@gnu.org> wrote:
> With the available .debs you should now be able to enable these.

I'm afraid I'm going to need more guidance here. Your little tutorial
in readme [0] is helpful (thank you!), but I still have questions.

[0]: https://people.debian.org/~sthibault/tmp/hurd-amd64/README.txt

I can't just install packages by reconfiguring apt and installing them
directly as you suggest, because that assumes a working Debian
installation -- naturally, one for a different architecture, and one
that these new packages would break.

Maybe I'm supposed to use the apt flags which tell it to operate on a
chroot? I've tried

apt -o RootDir=/path/to/chroot/ -o Architecture=hurd-amd64 install
hurd/sid-sthibault

(with the 'deb ...' line in /etc/apt/sources.list inside the otherwise
empty chroot) to no avail.

I've tried debootstrap, but that errors out at "Can't verify that
target arch works" -- apparently usr/bin/arch-test does not recognize
hurd-amd64. The way to disable that check appears to be --foreign; but
I wasn't (yet) able to get that working either. If you are using
debootstrap and it works for you, perhaps you could share a known-good
debootstrap incantation?

I could try to just extract some packages using your 'dpkg-deb -x'
tip, but I would still like for apt/dpkg to figure out the
dependencies for me, and generally automate as much of the process as
possible.

Sergey