[Debian-ppc64-devel] Re: ppc64 archive bloating alioth disk ...

[Andreas Jochens]

On 05-Sep-20 13:05, Sven Luther wrote:
> I just got an irc ping from Raphael Hertzog, who was complaining about the
> 52GB bloat of the ppc64 archive on alioth, mentioning that alioth was not
> meant for such stuff (basically forking the archive), and asked if we could
> please put ressources usage to the strict minimum.
> 
> Could you do some cleanup, and possibly search for other hosting solution, or
> let it all be and work together with us on the biarch setup and ppc64 rebuilds
> of needed libraries and packages ? Start with those you are actually using, or
> at least list those here, will be much easier that way.

Hello Sven,

thanks for the hint. I just freed about 25 GB of disk space on alioth 
and I will do some further cleanup of the ppc64 package archive to 
reduce the disk usage to probably about 15 GB.


I still do not know how you intend to build 64-bit packages on a "biarch
setup". Do you have any working patches for this? Or maybe a test 
archive with installable 64-bit packages which could teach me how 
this will work? 

I think it will be a _major_ task to create any kind of "biarch setup" 
for a reasonable set of libraries for Debian. Many people have already 
tried that and nobody had any success with this so far. 

The only libaries which are currently available in biarch versions for
any architecture are libc6, libgcc1, libstdc++6, libz and libncurses. It 
does not make much sense to extend this approach to a large set of other 
packages. This would be somewhat similar to making the whole archive 
cross-buildable. This is not the easiest way to get a large set of 
installable 64-bit packages.

The better approach is the one that is called 'multiarch'. That approach 
will allow to install packages that have been built for a different 
architecture, i.e. ppc64 packages on powerpc and amd64 packages on i386
and vice versa. That approach needs a native ppc64 package archive to 
provide the ppc64 packages that can be installed on powerpc.

I need a reasonably complete set of 64-bit libraries for my own
purposes. Because of this, I will not drop my own package archive until 
there is another working solution for this, i.e. until there is a 
working archive where I can install all necessary 64-bit libraries from.


By the way, your lastest 2.6.12 powerpc64 kernel is working very well
for me. Thanks a lot for your work on this and also for your work on
the new linux-2.6 kernel packaging setup. That new packaging setup 
is much better and cleaner than the previous one. I really hope that
the kernel udebs for the installer can somehow be integrated into the
unified approach and built from the linux-2.6 package directly instead 
of using architecture specific 'linux-kernel-di-*' kernel-wedging 
packages. This would make things even more transparent.

Regards
Andreas Jochens