On Wednesday 5. December 2018 03.38.59 Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton wrote:
it was quite hilarious to get up and running. https://wiki.parabola.nu/MIPS_Installation - oh. discontinued. that's not going to help *sigh*.
Yes, it seems that people got enthusiastic when Stallman started using that Lemote laptop, but when he stopped using it, they all dropped MIPS as soon as they could. So, gNewSense and Parabola both supported the MIPS architecture on some level, and Guix still does, I think, although since the Lemote stuff supported mips64el, any remaining support in these distributions is not useful for 32-bit devices, amongst which is the Ingenic SoC that you were looking at.
Of course, Debian supports everything of interest, but then there has to be a process of weeding out non-free packages and content. Since your EOMA68 campaign, PureOS has become a candidate for a suitable Debian-based FSF- endorsed distribution (ignoring systemd concerns). If Trisquel hadn't switched to Ubuntu as its base, it would also have been a candidate, but instead it suffers from Ubuntu's arbitrary architecture selection policy.
basically it's a hell of a lot easier if you have a native x86 parabola install, as you can then use the equivalent of debian foriegn arch debootstrap, and the --second-stage you run a qemu emulator to finish off the install.
that's basically exactly what i did... except because i didn't have native x86 parabola i ran in qemu.
it worked really well and makes for a hilarious story.
I guess you are able to rely on the existing ARM port of Arch, though. What I found was that for building packages from scratch you have to combine Parabola and Arch repositories, and the mechanisms for doing this are not very coherent.
I ended up having to write tools to look up packages in different packaging repositories, first trying one place, then another, and so on. Some of these tools I ran in an appropriate x86 Parabola installation because they won't work in a "portable" way in other environments.
What I learned is that there is a considerable difference between genuine multi-architecture distributions and the kind of architecture-and-a-half distribution that Arch seems to be, with Parabola being under that umbrella. I think Arch has already thrown i386 over the side, so I wonder whether Parabola will also have to do so in time as well.
Generally, I think that the Arch maintainers make some pretty questionable decisions: switching the default version of Python to version 3 very early on in the 3.x lifespan being one notable example. But having the choice is good for people who can get along with such decisions, I guess.
Paul
P.S. It is also pretty frustrating that people seem to need Richard Stallman to tell them what to do. When I asked people supposedly interested in porting the Hurd to L4-based systems about such matters, one of the responses indicated that Stallman didn't think that working on operating system fundamentals was worthwhile compared to doing other things.
But if something is worth doing, even if not everyone agrees, why does anyone need some kind of "sign off" from someone they've heard of? Just do what you think is right or interesting or enjoyable or useful, already! I honestly don't know why anyone would follow a mailing list on a topic if they didn't already know it was worthwhile.