Re: debootstrapping m68k-coldfire
On Tue, 4 Mar 2008, Roman Zippel wrote:
> On Tuesday 4. March 2008, Wouter Verhelst wrote:
> > Anyway, the problem isn't that bootstrapping coldfire is hard; I can do
> > that myself if needs be, and we'd have a working port within a few
> > months[1]. The problem is that adding another port isn't going to be
> > accepted by FTP masters: I don't recall who exactly, but an FTP master
> > did tell me that a coldfire port in Debian would only be accepted if it
> > was either part of the m68k port, or replaced it entirely.
>
> IOW technical reasons have no value when politics are involved. :-(
> If we force everything into a single port solely out of political reason, it
> gets a whole lot less interesting...
Why would a new separate port not be accepted? Because of disk and
mirror space requirements, or because of the overhead of having an
additional port (both in contrast to the (limited) audience of m68k and
Coldfire)?
If disk space and mirror space are the problems, perhaps there should be
a `Debian light' with less packages? Several big and resource hungry
packages will never be used on m68k anyway (and perhaps not even on the
slightly faster Coldfire). I'm quite sure we could fit m68k and Coldfire
versions of `Debian light' in the mirror space of a full Debian port.
This could be useful for other ports as well, and lower the entry
requirements for new ports (cfr. the several recently added architectures
in the Linux kernel).
If all else fails, maybe we should start thinking about OpenWRT/m68k or
something like that...
Gr{oetje,eeting}s,
Geert
--
Geert Uytterhoeven -- There's lots of Linux beyond ia32 -- geert@linux-m68k.org
In personal conversations with technical people, I call myself a hacker. But
when I'm talking to journalists I just say "programmer" or something like that.
-- Linus Torvalds
Reply to: