Public SourceMage Discussion List

["Ethan Grammatikidis" <eekee57 AT fastmail.fm>]

There appears to be no source for the current linux-headers tarball for
powerpc architecture, meaning glibc may not be buildable in fresh
powerpc installs or, likely, in several other architectures.

The linux-headers tar files were both generated and hosted by a mage who
has since quit smgl. If he ever generated a powerpc file when he last
bumped the version, it has been lost. The current SMGL mirrors only
popular files, making it not useful for this critical file. I've written
a couple of suggestions and notes in bug #14581. I'll reproduce them
here. This seems crtical enough to me to be worth cross-posting to the
bugtracker and here.

1: File needs to be available from a location both dedicated to SMGL and
not
maintained / paid for by one mage alone. Perhaps this host (or at least
this
directory) should be accessible to all mages so that any may update the
file.
The file should be updated regularly in any case, as glibc will not be
able to
use kernel features newer than the kernel headers it was built with.

2: Some means of sourcing the kernel headers from the user's computer be
found.
Note that this will require some definitive means of finding which
kernel the
user wishes to build against, which may in turn require significantly
more
advanced sorcery than we already employ.

Also: The spell uses a single ${HEADERS_VERSION} for all header files.
This
seems somewhat impractical to me, as it requires one maintainer to
attempt to
upgrade all architectures, or forces all architecture maintainers to get
and
configure the same kernel version. Note also that the kernel must be
configured
on a machine (or vm) of the chosen architecture for it's headers to be
useful.

-- 
Ethan Grammatikidis