[Raspbian-devel] Future plans for Raspbian in relation to Debian?

[peter green]

Andrei POPESCU wrote:
> Hello,
>
> I would be interested about what the future plans for Raspbian are. As 
> far as I understand (and hope) Raspbian is supposed to follow Debian as 
> close as possible. However, Debian is quite a complex beast and I'm not 
> sure what resources (both hardware and human) are available.
>   
We have more than enough build hardware for our present needs but going
forward it is a bit of an unknown. Bytemark offered to pay for  some but
I don't know how much. I'm hoping some build hardware with plenty of ram
and decent bang per buck will show up on the market between now and the
wheezy release.

Human resources are the bigger concern, we need to either expand our pool
of competant and trusted developers and/or put in place more automation
if we are to avoid going insane during the jessie cycle.

> [2] a note in xbmc's README.Debian looks quite encouraging that the 
> maintainer would be interested in such a target.
>   
One thing I do want to do is keep the generic and Pi specific parts of 
raspbian
seperate. There are a couple of reasons for this, firstly some people 
may want
to run as "pure" a system as possible with the firmware being the only 
non-free
thing on their box. Secondly while the Pi is our main target I hope it 
will not
be our only target. Raspbian already runs on the APC though right now it is
somewhat crippled there by missing kernel source.

As such my preffered way to handle xbmc would be a deidcated xbmc-rpi
source package. Ideally i'd like this to be derived from the debian source
package with as few changes as possible to make it easier for me to review.

> [1] support for Raspberry Pi in libCEC was introduced only in later 
> versions
>   
Do you know if libCEC requires any broadcom libs to support the Pi?
(e.g. will we need a special build of it for the Pi?)
Do you know if the debian maintainer for libCEC has a debian package
available of a suitable version?