Re: armhf TODO (was Re: Fosdem 2011: Debian on ARM)

[Wookey <wookey@wookware.org>]

+++ Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton [2011-02-07 14:19 +0000]:
> On Mon, Feb 7, 2011 at 11:29 AM, Konstantinos Margaritis
> <markos@genesi-usa.com> wrote:
> 
> > Heh, I read that mail before but I forgot to reply.
> 
>  :)
> 
> > Basically, there is no
> > such record. Porting involved lots and lots of hacks, porting debian to a new
> > architecture is certainly not straightforward or "friendly" process, it
> > requires too many failed attempts -build a package with those flags, then it
> > fails, then you rebuild it again,
> 
>  ahh f***, f***, f*** and f***-it some more.  that's *exactly* the
> information which needed to be recorded, and placed into an automated
> system.  so the opportunity has been completely lost, already.
> months of work down the toilet, so that the next person who wants to
> do an architecture port has to, once again, spend months of their time
> repeating the process.

Don't panic. It's not quite that bad. We are working on bootstraping
here at ARM and are taking quite good care to keep track of the
changes for exactly the reason that we don't want to do it again, and
do want to make it automable.

We also have a load of analysis of the cyclics deps and there is a
spec (of sorts) for what the metadata looks like for fixing this.

The actual project for using this is not yet public so we can't use
the internal repo at the sprint, but we can use an armel repo with the
patch set applied to do bootstrap experiments on. I hope to have time
to set that up ready to play with.

I would have published my cyclic-deps work too but I know some of it
is wrong, and it would be good to fix the known/obvious bugs before
publishing the graphs. It should be out real soon...

Wookey
-- 
Principal hats:  Linaro, Emdebian, Wookware, Balloonboard, ARM
http://wookware.org/