Re: Updated Debian Ports installation images
On 3/26/22 19:26, Stan Johnson wrote:
> It would be better if the HFS partition (/dev/sda2) were type
> Apple_Bootstrap instead of Apple_HFS so that it is not visible to Mac OS
> or Mac OS X. And changing it doesn't break anything (as the
> Apple_Bootstrap partition, it's still formatted as HFS, so it's the
> first HFS partition that Open Firmware sees):
>
> # parted -l
> Model: ATA ST9120822A (scsi)
> Disk /dev/sda: 120GB
> Sector size (logical/physical): 512B/512B
> Partition Table: mac
> Disk Flags:
>
> Number Start End Size File system Name Flags
> 1 512B 32.8kB 32.3kB Apple
> 2 32.8kB 256MB 256MB hfs Apple_Bootstrap boot
> 3 256MB 119GB 119GB ext4 untitled
> 4 119GB 120GB 759MB linux-swap(v1) swap swap
I don't know for sure whether that can be implemented with partman but I
can have a look. I was not aware that Apple has defined a different
partition type in order to hide it from MacOS X.
If the partition can still be mounted on Linux without any restrictions,
we can try to implement that. GRUB just needs to be able to access the
filesystem through the regular folder structure.
> And it is arguably a bad idea for GRUB to delete the Apple device driver
> partitions, even when it's using the entire disk (the "entire disk"
> should start after those partitions).
If you have a suggestion on how to implement that, you are welcome to send
me a patch. You have to keep in mind that partman and debian-installer are
a cross-platform design, so they don't automatically know about all the
weird peculiarities that Apple computers use.
> Of course, these are just suggestions, and I'm providing them as part of
> my feedback on whether GRUB installation works using the latest Debian
> PowerPC installation CD. Debian (and GRUB) maintainers should do
> whatever they want. I don't anticipate ever using GRUB on a New World
> PowerPC system as long as it doesn't work at least as well as yaboot
> (and there's no need for you to say again that yaboot is not supported
> upstream; that doesn't stop it from working).
Well, instead of insisting on using Yaboot, it would be more constructive
to help iron out the deficiencies that the GRUB-based setup has.
I have to admit that's becoming a bit frustrating that I have to keep fighting
off requests from users to push us back to use Yaboot without people realizing
that shipping unmaintained software is quite a burden to distribution maintainers.
All packages in Debian have to be rebuildable all the time, so if you have something
as unmaintained as Yaboot, you will sooner or later run into problems when any of the
dependencies are changing their API and it has already happened to Yaboot with the
ext2 library dependency. Another issue is buildability with newer compiler versions
which tend to become stricter which results in packages failing to build from source
which used to build fine in the past.
In open source, we are maintaining packages in source, not as binaries. And we didn't
switch to GRUB because we wanted to annoy our users but because maintaining the Yaboot
source package became a serious burden due to the issues mentioned above.
Adrian
--
.''`. John Paul Adrian Glaubitz
: :' : Debian Developer - glaubitz@debian.org
`. `' Freie Universitaet Berlin - glaubitz@physik.fu-berlin.de
`- GPG: 62FF 8A75 84E0 2956 9546 0006 7426 3B37 F5B5 F913
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