Yak Shaving — Git on a Terastation

Today I spent a considerable amount of time trying to install git on my Terastation.

First I discover that all the git-core ppc debian and rpm packages are compiled against a different version of libc. So I get the source for git, and attempt to compile it myself. I find that the Terastation doesn’t have a compiler. So, I go online and find that there’s a ppc development environment for the Linkstation. Once I unpack that, and setup my PATH, I try to compile git again, but run into problem with libraries and missing core-utils programs. Eventually I get that sorted out, and find problems with Perl. Finally, I was able to grab some perl packages that correspond to the version already on my Terastation, and unpack those, and compile git. Lastly I wrote up, and installed a script to run git-daemon. I’ve yet to set up a project that needs hosting, because I ran out of time yak shaving. The plan is to host my home directory, so I can manage stuff across several computers.

In the future I might one day setup a cross-compile environment, or (better yet) install a package manager on the thing. Either solution would make maintenance much, much easier.