Hoary for hppa?

[LaMont Jones]

In my spare moments over the past several weeks, I've been porting hoary
to hppa, mostly because it's my pet architecture.

And now people have been asking me about an hppa port of Ubuntu.
So, I'll be copying my archive to people.ubuntu.com sometime soon (and
announcing it here) - but it involves a trip to a friend's house to abuse
bandwidth availability.  Within the week, I expect.

If there is sufficient interest, we can get hppa.ubuntu.com (similar to
the sparc port's sparc.ubuntu.com.)  So please let me know if you're
interested in the port, so that I can pass that along.

Please note that hppa is not an ubuntu-supported architecture at this
time, although I intend to keep it running at least well enough to
support my (headless) machines, which kind of means ubuntu-base at least
with no promises for ubuntu-desktop and beyond.  Given that I'm not paid
to work on an hppa port, plus the fact that I'm busy these days, means
that not too much time gets spent on it.

Here is the state of the port:
1. Nearly all of main is built, as well as a small portion of universe.  See
   http://people.ubuntu.com/~lamont/quinn-diff.hoary.hppa for the
   quinn-diff output as of this writing (no, that's not automatically
   updated.)
2. The outstanding issues are:
   a. gcc-4.0 dies with an assertion in java
   b. gcc-3.4 and gdb are dep-wait on gcc-4.0
   c. mozilla-firefox fails to install due to alignment issues? in the
      chrome registry.  This is also blocking a few packages: (devhelp,
      epiphany-browser,yelp).
3. hppa kernel performance on ext3 with 2.6.10 is poor.  Cause unknown,
   may even be fixed in hppa cvs tree.  dunno.  The three machines I
   have are currently running: 2.6.11-rc4-pa1 (has the issue),
   2.6.8-1-64 (has different issues), and 2.6.10-3-hppa32 (not sure
   if it has the issue or not right now...)
4. At the moment, 3 packages diverge from the versions in hoary, all
   for the purpose of supporting hppa.
     console-data: adding hppa to the list to remove a d-i blocker
     xresprobe: add hppa to the dummy case - friendlier version pending
     ubuntu-meta: add hppa support.  This one can't go back into the
		  main repository until the port has more than just me
		  using it.
5. Debian installer is the current work-in-progress.  And no, it doesn't
   build yet.  And no, I'm not sure what to do once it does. :-)
   For that matter, several of the packages needed by d-i (which only
   looks at main) are in universe.

lamont