Re: Emulated buildds (for SCC architectures)?
Steve Langasek wrote:
>Hi Gunnar,
>
>On Fri, Mar 18, 2005 at 08:06:47PM -0600, Gunnar Wolf wrote:
>
>>And I am sure we can find more examples like these - I have not really
>>checked, but I would be surprised if architectures as popular as
>>Sparc, Alpha or ARM wouldn't have an emulator (although probably not
>>currently as reliable as those two).
>
>
>>Now, if we face dropping one or more of our architectures (i.e. m68k)
>>because new hardware can not be found anymore (the Vancouver proposal
>>mentions that "the release architecture must be publicly available to
>>buy new" in order to keep it as a fully supported architecture - I
>>know, SCC != fully supported, but anyway, a buildd can die and create
>>huge problems to a port), why shouldn't we start accepting buildds
>>running under emulated machines?
>
>
>I quite agree with Anthony that if we have to emulate the machine,
>there's not much sense in supporting it.
This makes no sense to me. There is a lot of embedded machines out there
that can, for instance, run a web browser (graphical links, w3m or even
mini-mo) but are not capable of running g++ (to give an example, and
hence they are not capable of /building/ mini-mo).
So, if you can emulate this machine in an amd64 1000x faster and with
100x more RAM, you can build an entire Debian system, and permit the
installation of a base system with the needed features for the embedded
application.
>I do know, from first-hand experience trying to get ssh running on a
>Cobalt, that compilation speed is not always correlated with the
>usefulness of a system; so I'm not completely opposed to using distcc
>(in moderation!) for release architectures, but I would still first
>like to see some serious discussion about why it's useful to build all
>the software we do for all the architectures before agreeing that such
>a distcc network is warranted.
>
Other question I have is: why the "(in moderation!)" comment? I think
distcc and ccache should be used thoroughly (sorry if this is the wrong
spelling) in the buildd process, and I have not seen any moderate,
rational and good argument in contrary.
Regards,
Massa
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