[Arm-netbook] [review] SoC proposal

[Philip Hands]

On Thu, 9 Feb 2012 16:34:27 +0000, lkcl luke <luke.leighton at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Thu, Feb 9, 2012 at 2:49 PM, Gordan Bobic <gordan at bobich.net> wrote:
> > Bari Ari wrote:
> >
> >> You might be surprised by how quickly GCC support can come together for
> >> a new cpu core that is also driven by a cooperative open software
> >> community without any hidden agendas, control issues or confused management.
> >
> > Sure, but these things take time to stabilize. ARMv7 hard-float hardware
> > has been around for quite a while, and only in the last few months has
> > it been possible to actually rebuild the whole distro with GCC for ARM
> > hard-float.
> 
>  yes.  i _did_ advise the debian developers to consider automating the
> process of rebuilding distros.  they have some rather stupid circular
> _build_ dependencies which they've managed to get themselves into by
> way of a) splitting the build (-dev) packages from the binary packages
> b) bootstrapping themselves up over NN years ago and never doing
> complete from-scratch builds, since.

I _think_ that's being addressed, with the addition of a
Build-Depends-Stage[1-9]+ (IIRC) so that one can build a minimal version
of the package with most of its options turned off, and use that to
either bootstra the package, or get you to a slightly less minimal
stage, and so on -- not sure if the proposal's been adopted yet though.

As for how long it takes to get 90% coverage of the Debian archive on a
new architecture, they've just run the experiment twice for you
(admitidly with archs rather close to already supported ones though):

  http://blog.einval.com/2012/01/09

the sharply rising green line in the included graph is the new s390x
(helps having a mainframe run the buildd) and the slightly less steep
red curve is armhf ... and that's the percentage of the 30,000 or so
packages  in Debian unstable (it's probably more than that now actually).

Cheers, Phil.
-- 
|)|  Philip Hands [+44 (0)20 8530 9560]    http://www.hands.com/
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