[Debootloaders-yaboot] Bug#589701: ofpath is not compatible with non-builtin disk controllers

[Benjamin Cama]

Hi Rick,

Le vendredi 24 septembre 2010 à 15:53 -0400, Rick Thomas a écrit :
> First, let me apologize for the confusing non-specificity of my bug  
> reports to you and everyone else who is following this (and related)  
> bug(s).  The only excuse I can offer is that at the time I was  
> submitting them, I wasn't sure what was causing the symptoms I was  
> seeing.  All I knew was that I couldn't do a squeeze install or an  
> upgrade from lenny to squeeze.  And I was frustrated by the total lack  
> of response.

Well, even if you didn't mention it explicitly, it was listed in the
lspci dump since the beginning and nobody saw it until now. And one may
also find it disturbing that a piece of software doesn't work with an
addon card on a machine that has free slots to add such cards ! But
bootstrapping an OS on non-original hardware modification is always a
bit hard.

> That said, and trying to go forward, the question now is "Where do we  
> stand on getting this fixed?"

If you are talking about this specific bug, the answer is "fix ofpath".
But actually, a more efficient thing to do would be to use ofpathname,
or rather ofpathname + ofpath/yaboot fixes. Which was to be done by
Aurélien more than 3 years ago, see #405337 …
Anyway, grub2 uses ofpathname, so I think we should try to use it. Or,
first, upgrade it, as it lacks a bit behind upstream (1.2.1 vs 1.1.0).
Again, the maintainer is Aurélien, who didn't give signs of life since
his email 2 weeks ago, so he may be MIA and the upgrade a bit harder
than we can hope.

> Can we come up with a list of specific problems -- and a 'todo' list  
> of release-critical things that need to be fixed for PowerPC Debian  
> Squeeze?

I see #587290 (merged with #580455) and #572869. I think the last one is
no more related to yours, even if a patch to use ofpathname would easily
fix it, I think. The first one should be fixed by your patch.

> In that line, we need a list of individual folks who are interested in  
> contributing to this effort.  Is this bug report (589701) a good one  
> to encourage all these folks to subscribe to in the interest of  
> centralized record-keeping?

I am not sure that polluting this report is a good idea. I would prefer
opening another one if there is a clearly defined point of view on that.
Which we don't have for now, I fear, because of a lack of concrete
result. Which may be partially solved with my next email…

benjamin