La Salle Debain

Open Source @ Consolidated Braincells Inc.

About La Salle Debain

This is a weblog I'm keeping about my work on Debian and any other useful Debian related info I come across. It is not meant to compete with other news sources like Debian Weekly News or Debian Planet. Mostly it is just a way for me to classify and remember all the random bits of information that I have floating around me. I thought maybe by using a blog it could be of some use to others too. Btw. "I" refers to Jaldhar H. Vyas, Debian developer for over 8 years. If you want to know more about me, my home page is here.

The name? Debain is a very common misspelling of Debian and la salle de bains means bathroom in French.

If you have a comment to make on something you read here, feel free to write to me at jaldhar@debian.org.

You can get an rss 0.91 feed of the blog here.

Friday, July 29 2011

hello_minix-i386.deb

NEW YORK, Jul 29, 2011

PreventaConf

The crowd of thousands gathered here to attend PreventaConf 2011 were abuzz over the unveiling of the culmination of 3 years of aimless arsing about^ww^w concentrated development which has led to the porting of dpkg to the MINIX 3 operating system.

dselect on Minix

Women fainted, men wept openly, medical personnel were kept busy dealing with the many instances of heart seizure, multisensory hallucination and spontaneous combustion which accompanied this momentous event.

Much remains to be done.

start-stop-daemon needs to be ported. It is not built for now.
A basic set of essential packages needs to be created. Currently all that stuff lives in /usr/local or /usr/pkg. This has already caused problems when e.g. dpkg-architecture assumed perl was in /usr/bin.
fakeroot needs to be ported so you don't have to build .debs as root which is currently the case.
Other support programs such as update-rc.d and ldconfig etc. are needed. Currently .debs have to be installed with --force-all to get around their lack. (ldconfig atleast could just be a noop as Minix doesn't actually support shared libraries yet.)
There are still some API deficiencies. lchown(2) doesn't exist, getpwent(3) doesn't seem to work reliably. etc. Could this cause problems? We will have to investigate and provide workarounds if necessary. No doubt other problems will crop up as work progresses.

Still this is a major milestone of which the Debian Minix developers are justifiably proud.

posted at: 16:47:44 | #