Update firmware, Ubuntu/Debian

[Michael E Brown]

On Wed, Jul 11, 2007 at 07:54:28PM +0200, Robert Lindgren wrote:
> Thanks for clearing out that situation
> :) It's great that there is a solution available for the system BIOS,
> but this is only for the system bios right, not for PERC firmware, bmc
> and so on?
> 
> It's great that Dell is putting in some efforts in debian-ify the "normal"
> tools, really looking forward to that. Is there a time frame for this or is
> it released when it's done?

As the maintainer for this pile of stuff, I can probably address this.

The first point that I would like to make in order to set the stage is
that libsmbios, firmware-tools, et al, are all community-support-only
tools. That means that I add features as demand warrants and as I have
time to work on them. There is no guarantee of timeliness for any
feature (as several people know, as they have patiently waited for
certain features for months in some cases.) These tools are a portion of
my job responsibilities, but are not normally prioritized over anything
else I have to work on.

I have very limited time to maintain this stack across rhel, sles,
fedora, debian, ubuntu, etc. I personally maintain both the core tools
as well as the fedora, rhel, and sles ports of these. I have tried on a
couple of occasions to kickstart debian ports, but I have found that I
am not in a position to effectively maintain it by myself. This is
mainly due to my limited knowledge of debian packaging and repository
management.

That being said, I would *HAPPILY* welcome anybody who would like to
volunteer to maintain a debian port of the tools. I've made mention of
this on a couple of occasions, and although I've gotten a couple of
nibbles of interest, I've never gotten anybody to actually contribute
code on a regular enough basis to call it 'maintained'.

Contributing:

Here are some details on some aspects and where I need help.

1) git repos: All of the code for these projects is in git. Available
read-only at http://linux.dell.com/git/. I expect that anybody who wants
to contribute would do so in the form of git patches, or regular gnu
diff format.

2) docs/wiki: I have moved most of the documentation for these projects into
the wiki. If somebody wants to help with the documentation, I can
probably arrange for this access. Help in this area would be greatly
appreciated.

3) fedora/rhel: These package spec files are all already complete and
natively available in fedora. I dont anticipate needing much help here.
This is my main OS and most of my work is initially done here.

4) sles: I am by no means a suse expert. I have packages available for
suse that mostly are simple recompiles of the fedora packages. If there
is suse-specific stuff, I am mostly not taking advantage of it. If
somebody wants to submit patches to improve suse support, I would
welcome them.

4) debian/ubuntu: I have initial debian packaging files in most of my
projects that dont already have native maintainers (libsmbios is already
natively maintained in debian). This includes firmware-tools and
firmware-addon-dell. I'm sure these are probably not optimal. I have had
some difficulty setting up debian repositories for these packages and
integrating these into my build/autobuild system. Help would be
appreciated.

--
Michael Brown
libsmbios,firmware-tools,dell-repositories maintainer