Re: Updating the hurd in Guix

[Damien Zammit]

Hi Ricardo,

On 11/2/22 11:58 pm, Ricardo Wurmus wrote:
> I still haven’t been able to upgrade the Hurd packages in Guix because
> it is not clear to me what commits and additional patches we need — and
> I don’t have enough time to figure this out by myself.

Yes I think we need an upstream for rumpkernel that isn't debian packaged.
The problem is, building rump requires a copy of the netbsd src tree
PLUS an out of tree module (netbsd are not maintaining it).
The out of tree module is called "pci-userspace" and there is no upstream
for that except github - and its out of date.

We merged pci-userspace and a copy of the netbsd source tree into
a repo called rumpkernel, and it's currently on debian only.
Then we store patches on top of that in the debian/patches folder.
There are also additional patches needed to patch the netbsd src tree,
to add the disk driver to rump, also in debian/patches.

You have to build rump and pci-userspace together,
as the tools are needed from rump.  So it makes sense to store them together in 
a repo.

I think we need to create a fresh repo using netbsd src as a submodule,
but we would still need to maintain patches for netbsd src until they are 
upstreamed.
Currently all this patching is managed via debian packaging.

> Could someone please list the needed patches and commits?  (For someone
> who is not experienced with Debian at all, I should say that “just use
> the Debian patches!” is not actionable advice to me.)

I could create a github repo that contains everything for rump in one repo,
but it would take time and would be easier to do once the netbsd src patches
are upstreamed, so we would not need to maintain separate patches.

> Getting more people to use the latest versions of the Hurd increases the
> likelihood of getting more contributions in that area.  With Guix it’s
> easy to get a Hurd system started, and I’d be happy to help updating
> things — if someone could please point out where all the code is that
> should be used.

I agree, but rump is currently a bit of a mess and only managed via debian 
packaging.

Cheers,
Damien