[Arm-netbook] What do 1,000 EOMA68-A20 PCBs look like?

[Paul Boddie]

On Friday 7. December 2018 16.28.24 Wookey wrote:
> On 2018-12-07 15:24 +0100, Paul Boddie wrote:
> > Cross-building would be a workaround, but Debian appears fundamentally
> > opposed to that,
> 
> Do you mean 'as buildds'?

I don't know. If that is the way the Debian archive is built then perhaps the 
answer is "yes".

> Debian's support from cross-building has improved hugely over the last 8
> years, and you can now crossbuild a _lot_ of debian. Helmut told me 'nearly
> 2/3rds' a while ago, although I'm not sure if that's 2/3rds of _everything_,
> or some subset.

It is certainly easier to perform cross-building activities, although I will 
admit that I am not typically cross-building packages these days. I've 
probably said before that when the cross-toolchains became available, it 
helped a great deal with the things I tend to do, so I really appreciate them.

One thing that I do find frustrating, however, is the trail of pages on 
various sites (wikis, typically) that describe the state of progress at 
different points in time. It isn't particularly coherent and undermines the 
impression of the progress that has been made.

> There is lots more that could be done (not least educating upstreams
> that like to do 'uncrossable things'), but we are the opposite of
> 'fundamentally opposed to it'.

Perhaps I should have clarified that Debian appears fundamentally opposed to 
using cross-building as the means of building the archive for an architecture. 
I understand that the aim is to ensure that people can run systems that are 
able to build their own packages, but it seems that we will arrive at a point 
where the imperfect result of natively-built packages needing to be 
complemented by cross-built packages will become unavoidable.

> > even though the alternative is the abandonment of architectures. And
> > you even have the new and shiny arm64 support in jeopardy because the
> > appropriate server hardware never seems to get to market (or stick
> > around).
> 
> In what way is arm64 'in jeopardy'? I don't think it's going anywhere.

Maybe I got the wrong impression from this message:

https://groups.google.com/d/msg/linux.debian.devel.release/meYaIZR7Sm0/GtHUxlbGAQAJ

I guess that the main concerns are that some arm64 products aren't supporting 
arm32 (of whichever flavour), that there are lots of "development board" 
products but not so many "data centre" products, making automation and 
management difficult. I might also add that when looking at ARM server 
offerings, they seem to be pretty expensive (maybe to differentiate themselves 
from existing offerings on traditional server architectures), and it probably 
doesn't help that companies don't follow through on their roadmaps, meaning 
that people end up waiting forever for something that might have been a usable 
product.

But maybe there is no shortage of usable arm64 hardware for archive-building 
purposes and that my perceptions of such shortages for other architectures are 
also incorrect, too. If so, I stand corrected.

Paul