argh

Well it's been a frustrating couple of days on most fronts.

Yesterday and early today I spent many hours trying to get a more stable hppa development environment on my a500. Since my old development environment tended to crash every 5 minutes and I needed to build a new 2.6 kernel with the things I need for nfs root, this involved a lot of pain and eventually installation of a temporary disk-based system to do the kernel compile (and dpkg -i !) on. Finally I seem to have a hppa kernel that can handle nfs root and run for several hours w/o falling over.

The point of that exersise was to update d-i to use the newest hppa kernel packages, so then I worked on that. Only to find out, that the new kernel didn't just fix the RC security holes that we're delaying the release over. No, this kernel also dropped some modules, added hundreds of other modules, changed deps between some modules, etc. It was the level of changes I'd expect to see with a new upstream kernel version, not a minor debian version change for security fixes.

[ It really sucks when you're trying to do one thing, like get a release out ASAP and have to deal with other people for whom that is not the most important thing. The Debian kernel team more and more appear to not be interested in that. See also recent thread on updating to 2.6.10 at this late date. Or is my frustration just making me crabby? ]

Unfortunatly I didn't even notice some of the hppa module changes yesterday so I had to roll two versions of the udebs, making lots of decisions that I'm not really qualified to make as a not-really-hppa-literate person, such as which modules will be in d-i at all, and bother the ftp-masters twice to get them rushed past NEW. And I'm still not done, because this new development environment is not as stable as I'd hoped, and has begun to segfault apt during builds of d-i initrds. More and more obstacles.

It's not as if hppa is even an arch I care about, beyond it apparently needing to work before we can release sarge. Sigh.

Add to this a smashed finger which is making typing painful, and a broken debian mirror that took a few hours to track down and fix, and it's not been a worthwhile couple of days.