Hands for the mipsel port / bootstrapping

[Steve Langasek <vorlon@netexpress.net>]

Hi all,

I was surprised to learn when I went digging that there actually is a
debian-mipsel port in progress.  The more I look into the matter the happier I
become, because I was fully expecting to have to do most of the work from
scratch myself, and I'm thrilled that this is not the case.

I have a Cobalt CacheRaq that we're using for an application that requires a
kernel newer than the included 2.0.34, and given that the only updates coming
out of Sun Cobalt are security fixes, I'd like to upgrade the whole OS to
Debian while I'm at it.  I have no problem with putting some work into the
mips port in order to do this right -- all in all, I'm just happy that
I'm not going to be building this system completely from scratch.

This is the first Debian port I've gotten involved in, so I'm not sure where
the best place for me to start is.  Is there a mipsel autobuilder yet?  What
means are available for bootstrapping a Debian mipsel system?  I've always
liked the 'debootstrap' package, which doesn't appear to be built for mipsel
yet -- has anybody tried using this?  (I guess there are still some problems
with it wrt sid, which of course is the only distro that includes mipsel..
perhaps it worked with sid at some point in the past, or perhaps someone is
working on fixing this problem?)

Are most people doing mipsel development using a native or cross-compiling
build system?  After many years of dealing with Cobalts (great systems for
many things, but compiling is not one of them), I personally prefer using
cross-compilers from my x86 systems as much as possible, but I know there are
people who feel cross-compiling is only appropriate while bootstrapping a
port.  If cross-compiling is considered ok, I might even be able to offer the
use of a system for an autobuilder..

At any rate, I hope to have a Debian chroot on this Cobalt by the middle of
next week; at which point, if there's work I can help with, point me to it,
and if not, I'm sure I'll find plenty of work of my own. :)

Regards,
Steve Langasek
postmodern programmer