Adding armhf and pwerpcspe to sh4 - in a separate repository On February 24th, 2009, Emdebian added support for SH4 [0] into the main repository. Various issues cropped up as a result of this and adding more ports to Emdebian Grip and the net result is that all unofficial ports in Emdebian Grip need to be moved into a separate repository and a separate build process. Wherever possible, the list of packages in Emdebian Grip will be the same for official and unofficial architectures. Reasons: Unofficial Debian ports have several issues which affect how the ports have to be handled in Emdebian. No migrations - Unofficial ports are, by definition, incomplete. Package builds are sometimes delayed and migrations within the rest of the Debian will not wait for an unofficial port. Pool overlaps - Port repositories use separate pool directories for each port but this causes space problems when preparing an Emdebian filter repository which folds the pools into one. Unreleased packages - Unofficial repositories do not usually carry source packages. Some packages are unreleased which can mean that the sources have been patched. The net result is that unofficial ports can be hard to use within Emdebian (for users and the maintenance scripts, i.e. me). Packages which are Architecture: all can get pushed ahead of the Debian version by changes in one of the unofficial ports. The lack of a testing suite means that the old version of the package disappears as soon as the next version appears, preventing the creation of a testing suite at a later date. Some packages might not build on all ports, causing missing dependencies. Overall, there is no chance of a port architecture making it into a stable release, Debian or Emdebian, until officially adopted by Debian and included into the regular buildd/migration infrastructure. The amount of work required to side-step this is larger than the effort required to get the unofficial ports adopted as official - at which point the issue of a stable release disappears. SH4 packages have been removed from the main Emdebian Grip repository and put into a new ports repository alongside packages for armhf and powerpcspe. Details will appear on the ports page [1] of the Emdebian website in due course, along with a News item describing this change. [0] http://www.emdebian.org/News/2010/20100224.html [1] http://www.emdebian.org/ports/ -- Neil Williams ============= http://www.linux.codehelp.co.uk/
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