[Soc-coordination] week 12 report: improve the debian port mipsel

[Arturo Borrero Gonzalez]

# GSoC 2015 week 12 report: improve the Debian port mipsel

This week I've had involvement in several tasks:
 * ioapps [0]
 * lierolibre [1]
 * nim [2]
 * capnproto [3]
 * opencollada [4]
 * gmp-ecm [5]
 * ncl [6]

[0] https://buildd.debian.org/status/fetch.php?pkg=ioapps&arch=mipsel&ver=1.4r2-3&stamp=1385363110
[1] https://buildd.debian.org/status/fetch.php?pkg=lierolibre&arch=mipsel&ver=0.5-1&stamp=1355068845
[2] https://buildd.debian.org/status/fetch.php?pkg=nim&arch=mipsel&ver=0.11.2%2Bdfsg1-2&stamp=1438296591
[3] https://buildd.debian.org/status/fetch.php?pkg=capnproto&arch=mipsel&ver=0.5.2-2&stamp=1436959645
[4] https://buildd.debian.org/status/fetch.php?pkg=opencollada&arch=mipsel&ver=0.1.0~20140703.ddf8f47%2Bdfsg1-1&stamp=1438038099
[5] https://buildd.debian.org/status/fetch.php?pkg=gmp-ecm&arch=mipsel&ver=6.4.4%2Bds-2&stamp=1437074376
[6] https://buildd.debian.org/status/fetch.php?pkg=ncl&arch=mipsel&ver=6.3.0-3~exp1&stamp=1436966406


## ioapps

Finally, after a month of patience, I was contacted back by upstream
maintainer Jiri Horky.
He is willing to work with me towards a fix, so let see what happens
in following days.

## lierolibre

Ping'ed Anibal to upload NMU.

## nim

This week I've been working with upstream towards a patch.
After some patch-testing, still no results.

## capnproto

Finally we have a working patch, tested by Dejan Latinovic
<Dejan.Latinovic at imgtec.com> and me.
My previous ICE dissapeared in a sid environment update :-)

Now, I'm just waiting the maintaier to upload the fix and close the
bug #790571 [7].

[7] https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=790571

## opencollada

Followed up with upstream in their ticket [8]. No patch yet.

[8] https://github.com/KhronosGroup/OpenCOLLADA/issues/338

## gmp-ecm

I was told the upstream developer I was working with was off-line
(Paul Zimmermann).
We were working closely towards a fix, but still more work is required.

As of 18/Aug he seems on-line again.

## ncl

No news in bug #789817 [9]. Alastair McKinstry seems busy and can't
give me a hand.

[9] https://bugs.debian.org/789817

## ci20 board update from wheezy to jessie

I tried to update my ci20 mipsel board from debian wheezy to debian
jessie but I was unsuccessful.
The hard point seems to be the kernel, which is very system-specific.

I tried two main paths:
 * keep the default kernel and update just userspace
   -> bad option: the default kernel lacks support for jessie's udev.

 * update the kernel
   -> I was simply unable to download and compile a new kernel in the
ci20 board due to the poor communication
      between my network and the github repository. After hours of
slow download the connection hangs. I tried 4-5 times before giving
up.
   -> Use other binary kernels from the debian archive (I tried
several mipsel-malta kernels) which
      were also very difficult to install due to storage limitations
in the ci20 board.

I have another pending path: try newer debian 7 imanges from the
vendor and pray for the kernel to support jessie's udev.

-- 
Arturo Borrero González