On 21 November 2010 23:30, Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton
<lkcl@lkcl.net> wrote:
apologies konstantinos, this crossed over with someone else's
excellent question, to which you should be receiving the response by
now. the summary is this: i do not believe it is off-topic to have
specific hardware and specific software totally excluded from testing
at the sprint, on the basis that the only available toolchain,
libraries and firmware is proprietary, requires an NDA and is only
given out to the ARM silicon licensees, let alone to end-users.
I don't know about what firmware and libraries you are talking about, but at
least the toolchain that I am using for armhf is Debian's own gcc with Linaro
patches enabled. As for the hardware, we (Genesi) have already given a
significant number of ARM devices (in total ~100 Smarttops and Smartbooks)
to selected Debian developers (and Ubuntu and Linaro developers as well
as others) to work on exactly this issue: better free software support for
those devices. This specific hardware will also be available at the sprint -in
fact, every developer that will attend the sprint will get a free unit there, if they
do not already own one- so testing software there will be possible. I am actually
using armhf on my boxes here, admittedly with some problems, but then again
it's a new port.
that it is entirely ARM's fault that this situation is the case is
particularly embarrassing - to ARM, who are actually sponsoring the
sprint, but that fact _is_, strictly speaking, off-topic.
I don't disagree. It is a valid issue. But the topic of the thread IS the sprint,
which was initiated by Debian and Genesi and then ARM got into the picture
by providing the place for the sprint. For that alone I am grateful. Even more
so, we can talk to them about those issues /when/ we get there.