Debian packaging and backport requests for OpenPOWER, Talos II, Blackbird?

[pocock]

Are there any packages that don't exist at all in Debian but would be essential or highly desirable on Debian systems?

Are there packages in unstable that are either not in the stable release or they require something from a newer version to be backported to stable to make them work on ppc64el?

Maybe these could be entered as RFP or Request-for-backport bugs in bugs.debian.org and then a usertag can be added to all of those so they can be found quickly.  This is an example of how arm64 bugs and package requests are tagged.

I'm willing to build packages or backports of the most important things that I will use myself but it would be helpful if people can point them out or enter any hints or concerns through the BTS.

[Borley]

I may have touched on some of these in my workarounds thread but there are some programs which I currently cannot use because packages are not available/installable in Debian 10's ppc64le (whereas the same packages are available on amd64):

openshot-qt       (python3-openshot but it is not installable)
mozc    (I did not investigate the cause, but anthy is works instead)
anki      (python3-pyqt5.qtwebengine (> 5.11) but it is not installable)
mupen64plus-qt      (plugin packages are available but the main binary package is not)
dolphin-emu           (data package is available, main package is not)
obs-studio
0ad
openmorrowind

And not ppc specific but; is Xonotic left out of Debian because Nexuiz is maintained in its place?

[pocock]

Thanks for this feedback

obs-studio is one of the things I want to run myself, so I would probably look at that first

Debian buildd says it already compiles on ppc64el on both sid and buster:

https://buildd.debian.org/status/package.php?p=obs-studio&suite=unstable
https://buildd.debian.org/status/package.php?p=obs-studio&suite=buster

Does it run or are there bugs on ppc64el?  Are those bugs in the Debian BTS?  If so, it would be really helpful to tag them as described in the opening post on this topic.

I'm planning to get one of the next generation of AMD Radeon cards, described in this other thread, one of the reasons for that is I would like to try their VCN hardware encoding for video streaming.  Unfortunately, according to that article, the AV1 support may not appear in these cards and may only arrive in 2021.  Various news articles have appeared suggesting AMD will release the Navi 2 cards between September and December.

[pocock]

For qtwebengine, it is very easy to enable ppc64el in the Debian control file but it won't work until it is enabled in QtWebEngine itself

As commented elsewhere, I was able to build OBS, I'll test it and make the packages available shortly.

[Borley]

Looking forward to it. SimpleScreenRecorder has been just barely enough to get by, so my more complicated projects have been in a sort of limbo.