Re: Starting a debian-cross mailing list

Hello,

On Tue, Jul 23, 2013 at 8:44 AM, W. Martin Borgert <debacle@debian.org> wrote:

On 2013-07-22 10:02, Jeremiah Foster wrote:
> While the amount of discussion may not be large enough to warrant another
> list, asking people to subscribe to debian-devel to follow debian-cross I
> think is suboptimal. It is very hard to pick out the relevant threads from
> debian-devel and there is a lot of traffic.

I agree. A lot of people (e.g. colleagues in my company) are
interested in cross-compiling on Debian, but not necessarily in
any other aspects of Debian development. As long as mailing
lists do not have e.g. standardised tags for automatic
filtering, we need to use specialised mailing lists, even if
there is not much traffic.

Note: I assume, that debian-cross will not only cover
Debian-to-Debian cross-compiling, but also cross-compiling to
other targets, e.g. Android, 8-bit-microcontrollers or
proprietary systems such as MS Windows. Please correct me, if
I'm wrong.

Actually, I suspect there won't be a lot of that for two reasons; Firstly, Debian ARM folks tend to be Free Software advocates. This may be due to the prevalence of cheap hardware with "linux" on it. One begins to hack on these machines and discovers some scary things -- missing licenses, incorrect kernel versions, hacky drivers, etc. It is so much easier if there is a corresponding source code repository and a one-to-one correspondence of code to binary and good Free Software distributions provide this. Of course many of us prefer software licensed under the GPL so that will likely have an impact on list discussions.

Secondly, I've not seen a lot of discussion on microcontrollers (do many of them run Linux?), Wince, or even Android. I suspect the Debian tools tend to be Debian specific, i.e. debbootstrap creates a new Debian (or Ubuntu) chroot and doesn't have a lot of usefulness for Fedora for example, let alone Windows.

As usual, YMMV, but I don't think there will be a lot of non-Debian discussion.

Cheers,

Jeremiah