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

[Konstantinos Margaritis <markos@genesi-usa.com>]

(removing a few people from the list)

On Monday 07 February 2011 16:19:52 Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton wrote:
>  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.
> 
>  again, the chances are that, because no automated system has been
> created, no automated system will be used.  and once again, they will
> use a manual hack-it-and-forget-it approach, making the _next_
> person's job just as equally difficult.

You're underestimating the value an automated system has, and overestimating 
the value of those notes. What took me days to find out regarding the cyclic 
dependencies and what needs to be solved, would be a matter of seconds for 
such a tool. Mathematically speaking, such a tool if it does not exist already 
for debian packages, it should be trivial to write and detect such 
dependencies, no matter how many levels deep. Then with the output of this 
tool, policy changes might take place and the relevant packages fixed. There 
half the problem solved. What took me months, with these changes should take 
just a few weeks for a new porter. But this will never happen without this 
tool and without the policy changes. 
 
>  ok, so let me check: are you saying that at least the required
> information can be derived?  that it *hasn't* been lost; that you
> encoded the required information into the packages?
> 
>  i'm not sure what you're saying, here.

I'm just saying that the todo wiki is a good starting point for someone to 
start their own architecture port -assuming they know how. Some bug reports 
are relevant to other arches as well, not just armhf and pretty much all would 
need to be filed for a new port as well, many with just a 
s/armhf/<newportnamehere>.

Konstantinos