[LinuxBIOS] mkelfImage adoption on Debian and Ubuntu

[Martin-Éric Racine]

Greetings,

I'm currently packaging mkelfImage for Debian and Ubuntu, due to a
number of recent LTSP products based upon LinuxBIOS not being able to
boot with ELF images produced using etherboot.org's old mkelf-linux
tool. There is interest on the Ubuntu side to eventually migrate to
this tool for LTSP, provided that it can be verified to generate ELF
images that also work for booting Etherboot/Netboot devices based on
commercial BIOS.

In the process of packaging mkelfImage, a number of issues related to
the upstream tarball came up, which prompted me to contact the people
mentioned in AUTHORS, to no avail. No response. The main issues are a
non-pristine upstream 2.7 tarball and a rather convoluted autotools
implementation that makes it very difficult to cleanly build this
software in a repeatable way.

Thus, in the interest of furthering LinuxBIOS adoption, I am wondering
if anyone would be interested in picking up upstream's aging 2.7
tarball, cleaning up its Makefile and bringing it up to current GNU
recommended practices, adding missing author credits in each source
file's headers, etc. possibly even adding support for amd64 - in
essence, to become the new upstream?

Once we have a new, properly documented pristine upstream 2.8 tarball
with a clean autotools implementation that meets Debian's standards,
inclusion into Debian and Ubuntu can proceed.

Best Regards,
-- 
Martin-Éric Racine
http://q-funk.iki.fi