arla Debian package

[Love]

Falk Hueffner <falk.hueffner at student.uni-tuebingen.de> writes:

> Hi,
>
> since the arla package in Debian is currently in an unusable state, I
> considered doing my own. I have some questions for this:

We have talked to some lokal (debian)people to take it over, but it never
have happened.
 
> The major difficulty is the xfs kernel module. Is it really needed to
> build xfs.o for each kernel version?

Yes. Diffrent kernels export diffrent interfaces. Even kernels in the 2.2.x
branch have changed so much that a recompile is nessesery.

> If so, I would likely create a seperate package for it. It seems I also
> need some hack to build both UP and SMP xfs.o's and detect in init.d if
> we have SMP, right?

Yes. Dunno how you build both UP and SMP debian kernels, but you probaby
know that better. On think about debian kernels I do now it that the stuff
under /usr/src/ is for a stable kernel and you need to use the configure
option --with-sys= to make it get the right headerfiles. But that you
probably already knew.
 
> What are the header files (like fs.h etc.) and the static libraries
> (like libarlalib.a) which get installed for? Are there any projects
> that use them?

We install them since they exist. I don't know any project that uses them
right now.
 
> Why is arlad not in sbin?

Its in libexec in HEAD. 0.34.x is only a bugfix/stable branch, and the idea
is only to fix bugs and not introduce that much new functionality.
 
> What does -z do to arlad? Should I pass it by default?

It ignores the cached values (from last time arlad was started,
/usr/arla/cache/{fcache,volcache}).

Its default in 0.34.4 and newer.

Love