[Soc-coordination] Weekly report (8th week) - Debian GNU/Hurd Debianish initialization

[4winter at informatik.uni-hamburg.de]

.. link: 
.. description: 
.. tags: gsoc, debian, hurd
.. date: 2013/08/09 21:18:57
.. title: My worst week yet...
.. slug: my-worst-week-yet

This hasn't been my week. I had to fix two of my Hurd installations I
use for development and testing. I spent countless hours waiting for
some package to be rebuilt, reading scientific papers about adding
stuff to the Mach kernel. Fascinating stuff like `thread migration
<http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.19.7348>`_
that would (among other things) allow for proper resource accounting
on Mach kernels.

Oh, and gcc is a sadistic bastard::

  In file included from printf-parsewc.c:2:0:
  printf-parsemb.c: In function ‘__parse_one_specwc’:
  printf-parsemb.c:407:1: internal compiler error: Segmentation fault
  Please submit a full bug report,
  with preprocessed source if appropriate.
  See <file:///usr/share/doc/gcc-4.7/README.Bugs> for instructions.
  The bug is not reproducible, so it is likely a hardware or OS problem.

A similar error came up like five hours into my libc rebuild. How nice
of gcc to retry the build to figure out whether it is to blame or the
environment only to throw away the successful build and abort my build
process :/

* I published my patch series addressing all `sysvinit`-related
  issues:
  http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-hurd/2013-08/msg00000.html

* I since found three minor issues, so I'll roll another series
  shortly. But since this somewhat breaks the ABI (`/hurd/init` is no
  longer PID 1) this is waiting for a libc rebuild that I haven't
  managed to get done so far.

* I updated my patch series for the `sysvinit` package. I'm quite
  pleased with it as it is and I'll propose it for inclusion with the
  `sysvinit` package shortly. Unfortunately this depends on the
  patched `hurd` package with is blocked by the libc package :/

Next week I'll finally propose my `sysvinit` patch series. Oh, and
implement the `-d` flag in our `umount`. I thought I had implemented
all the flags used by the `initscripts`, but somehow I missed `-d`. If
I get bored, I'll take a look at the `network related issues
</gsoc/#networkrelatedissues>`_, but I bet I won't get there...