[Yaird-devel] Re: Processed: Escalating #345067 to the technical comittee, as the maintainer asked me to do so, and is unable or unwilling to do his job without this.

[Sven Luther]

On Tue, Mar 07, 2006 at 11:43:34PM +1000, Anthony Towns wrote:
> On Tue, Mar 07, 2006 at 02:03:17AM -0800, Debian Bug Tracking System wrote:
> > Subject: Re: Processed: Escalating #345067 to the technical comittee, as 
> >          the maintainer asked me to do so, and is unable or unwilling to 
> >          do his job without this.
> 
> > > reassign 345067 tech-ctte
> > Bug#345067: [powerpc] ide-generic is not built on powerpc, yaird tries to include it and fails
> > Bug#343427: linux-image-2.6.14-2-powerpc: Installation fails
> > Bug reassigned from package `yaird' to `tech-ctte'.
> 
> I can see there's some sort of dispute over this bug, but I can't see a
> precise explanation of exactly what it breaks. 

ide-generic is not built on powerpc, yaird will inconditionally try to include
ide-generic into the ramdisk if via82cxxx is present (while the real hacky
workaround was not to load it always, but only to load it after via82cxxx).

As a resuly, any powerpc machine using the via82cxxx module has a kernel which
is uninstallable with yaird, and as yaird used to be the default, this means
upgrade to newer kernel are uninstallable without hand-hacking yaird.

> Jonas Smedegaard's comment in #343427, in response to Sven Luther:
> 
> > > The ide-generic module is not built on powerpc,
> > In the _current_ _official_ kernel package in Debian, or in any
> > sysfs-supporting powerpc Linux kernel ever, locally built or not?
> 
> seems to be the important question; and I gather the answer is that the
> official kernel packages don't use it, but that some can. Contents-powerpc

Well, even if some *can* use it, that is no reason enough to force it down the
throat of everyone, and in any case, it is not enough to claim it is *needed*.

In fact i claim that the fact that the official kernel work without
ide-generic is proof enough that it *cannot* be *needed* on powerpc.

(at this point jonas simply refused to pursue the discussion, and there is no
other issue apart fro mthe tech comittee or an hostile takeover).

> seems to bear this out, as does my config-2.6.15-1-powerpc:
> 
> # CONFIG_IDE_GENERIC is not set
> 
> Has anyone at all spoken to the via82cxxx upstream about getting the
> dependency information fixed so that this hack isn't needed in the
> first place?

Well, it is not really a dependency as far as i see. The real problem is that
some x86 machines exhibited strange behavior with regard to DMA, when
ide-generic was loaded before via82cxxx, which is logical since it seems
ide-generic cannot do DMA without a real driver, and thus the solution was to
force ide-generic loading after via82cxx always, on all arches, without even
checking if ide-generic was built or not. My patch may not be the best, it
just reverted that previous hack on powerpc only, but all i got in return was
silence, and then plain refusal to even hear the argumentation exposed here.

Friendly,

Sven Luther