I’m currently working on something which will eventually amount to a re-bootstrapping of sorts of the Debian/m68k (Linux) port — patches to the Linux kernel, gcc, etc. are prepared (some have been accepted into upstream or the packages already). I will probably have more, once the compile processes finish, anyway (even emulated, it’s slow).

I think that, once I get past that TLS (thread-local storage, needed by eglibc) migration, I will try to find out a list of packages needed for debootstrap (AFAICT: all packages marked Essential, or of priority important, and all marked Build-Essential (for the *-builder variant), and their dependencies (although I’ll substitute sysv-rc with file-rc, which is better and needs less deps)) and pull arch:all from sid, then build the rest myself using a consistent snapshot of sid possibly with patches going to unreleased. Then I can use cowbuilder to make cleaner packages, which can eventually be uploaded (once I get enough to get a buildd running — kernel, bootloader, etc) — binNMUs are way to go here I suppose. I will only upload once it’s self-hosted, installable (seen by edos-debcheck), clean, etc. (i.e. I’ll rebuild all binaries) and probably keep a bootstrap repo around (until m68k caught up) so that unstable (possibly amended by unreleased for a while) will not again become uninstallable, e.g. if arch:all packages change their dependencies (Python, gcc-defaults are some I’ve seen). That bootstrap repository is needed anyway because debootstrap can’t install from two separate repositories (unstable+unreleased for example).

Progress is slow because I try to keep as close to official packages as possible, refuse to cross-compile, and try to produce uploadable if possible packages all the time. Getting patches into packages, so that I can build from unstable, instead of debian-ports.org unreleased, has proven time-consuming and occasionally frustrating as well. Although I would like to thank the people who helped me on the way already. (I am not naming any in fear of forgetting some, but you know who you are ☺) They are among the Debian (gcc, kernel, m68k) and Linux-68k crowd.

(Why does genattrtab in gcc-4.4 take 3½ hours when it took less than half an hour in gcc-4.3 anyway?)

I’m also still working on mksh and some Python ISO hacks for mika and some minor stuff, and further cleaning up MirBSD.

Well, did I mention dentists are sadists?