"Yarrow" on Alpha

[Mike Barnes <mike barnes sci monash edu au>]

I had a bit of free time last week, so I set my DS10 running with a 
script to go through every SRPM in the recent Fedora release and run a 
'--rebuild'. I'd previously built a bunch of the Severn release 
packages, so I had quite a few of the initial dependencies in place.

So anyway - after a bit of tweaking of a few spec files, and manually 
sorting out build orders, I have about 700 packages from Yarrow built. 
I'd like a little help with the rest, if anyone's game.

The big ones that'll need work are gcc, glibc and XFree86 - all of which 
I'm pretty sure that people on this list have built current versions of 
all of the above in the past, so it can't be impossible to tweak the 
RPMs until they compile, right? :)

I've got everything built so far in an apt repository. I already had apt 
built for 7.2 on the Alpha, and tools to manage it all, so I stuck with 
it. I haven't upgraded RPM itself yet, so the apt for 7.2 is working 
fine. There's a nice overview of using apt on RPM systems at: 
http://freshrpms.net/apt/

Where is it?
ftp://genuine-article.maths.monash.edu.au/pub/

That server has binary RPMs for apt, and a sample sources.list file set 
up for Yarrow and 7.2, to be copied into the /etc/apt directory.

(Oh, the side-effect here is that I've got an up-to-date set of 7.2 
apt-enabled, if anyone wants to use that to upgrade their systems. Just 
comment out the Yarrow lines from the sources.list file.)

If you're brave, you can then try an "apt-get upgrade" and see how much 
of your system gets replaced and stops working. I've never tried doing a 
cold install on a clean 7.2 system, though - there'd probably be a lot 
that wouldn't install. Apt is pretty good at warning you if it's going 
to rip huge chunks of your system away, though.

OK - I'm rambling. Basically - I'm having some fun here, and thought I'd 
share. Please DO NOT try using this on any important machine. My DS10 is 
still running with all the new packages installed, but I'm not really 
doing anything except compiling on it. There will be a heap of broken 
stuff. My long-term plan is to compile everything possible, then 
recompile it all again on the "complete" system.

Is there anyone else out there who considers this sort of thing "fun" 
and would like to play? Who knows - we might even end up with a working 
system. :)