Re: HVM support to be removed from Debian Squeeze: call for volunteers

[Thomas Goirand <thomas@goirand.fr>]

Ian Jackson wrote:
> Thomas Goirand writes ("[Xen-devel] HVM support to be removed from Debian Squeeze: call for volunteers"):
>>  Someone that is willing to do this job of security
>> maintenance HAS to raise hand here,
> 
> Hello.  Yes, I volunteer (with my day job hat on).  I've done security
> patching before in other contexts.

Great.

>> Mainly, the work would be to have a script (or some Makefile entries
>> with DESTDIR= for example) that would install all needed files in
> 
> You mean in the upstream package ?  This isn't quite trivial but it
> should be doable.

To me, that's the most easy way, yes, because this avoids the
double-work of listing files to install (once in the "make install" and
once in the debian/install).

> There is a slight difficulty in that the filesystem layout of the
> Debian Xen packages is quite different to upstream's.

Yes, because Debian uses versionned folders for /usr/lib/xen. Maybe we
could overwrite this in the Makefile with a variable. That's what I did
for numerous projects so that "make install" could be used by a spec
file using "make install MANUAL_DIR=%{_mandir}" for example. What do you
think? Could this apply to this project?

> But partitioning the output of `make dist-tools' etc. to provide
> something that can be used for qemu-dm build should be easy enough.

What do you mean here here? What's the use of "make dist-tools"?

One of my issue is to create the .orig.tar.gz with only the relevant
code, I'm not sure where to start. Could you do that? Maybe add a target
to the "upstream" Makefile? How should we do it?

>> debian/xen-hvm-support (if we call that package xen-hvm-support). Also,
>> the source package should contain ONLY what is strictly concerning
>> Qemu-dm (not a big issue, but it would be cleaner this way and make the
>> source package smaller). As of now, I don't know who is maintaining Qemu
>> in Xen at all. Any volunteer here that would work with me does NOT need
>> to know anything about Debian or Debian packaging, but only about Qemu
>> and Xen itself.
> 
> I'm very happy to help out with this

Cool.

> [swaps hats]
> 
> Also, I am a Debian Developer although I haven't been very active in
> Debian recently.  I would be happy to sponsor uploads, provided they
> seemed sane to me.

Great.

>> I think that the best way here, is to build a (small, 3 or 4 persons)
>> team to work on this issue so it can be addressed fast.
> 
> Yes.
> 
> Regards,
> Ian.

Can you start a project on Alioth, with a git repo? Would it be useful
(I never used alioth or gforge yet)?

Thomas