On Fri, Mar 05, 2004 at 02:58:39PM -0600, Ryan Underwood wrote: > On Fri, Mar 05, 2004 at 10:07:42PM +0900, GOTO Masanori wrote: > > > > > > That's crap. m68k is a lot more slow than most SH machines, and I am > > > (mostly) keeping up with sid on my m68k mac; also, there is no real > > > problem building sid for m68k, because we have 10 autobuilders or so for > > > m68k (a bit less now, due to some more or less political issues). This > > > mail is written at the console of my m68k mac, BTW :-) > > > > > > It's most certainly possible; whether the demand is there, that's > > > something else. > > > > I think the reason is simple. Debian developers don't have rich SH-3 > > or SH-4 hardware (ex: memory). It's neither ABI issue nor speed. > > Is it possible to set up cross-building buildd's instead? Buildd doesn't support cross-building. Ignoring that, I still wouldn't recommend it; although there is rudimentary support for cross-building of packages (by virtue of dpkg-cross and toolchain-source), it isn't fully supported: first, dpkg-buildpackage will not check for -$arch-cross packages when testing for build-dependencies; second, dpkg-cross will need some more work to be fully useful (most notably, it doesn't distinguish between architecture-independent and and architecture-specific packages, so it breaks dependencies on architecture-independent packages); and last but not least, policy doesn't mandate that packages have to be cross-buildable, so many will simply fail to build. While the first two problems could be solved by some well-done patches, the last one is probably a major showstopper. Still, even if policy were changed to mandate packages so that cross-building would be possible, I'm not sure whether that would be a good thing. After all, cross-building makes running regression tests as part of the build process considerably harder, and I don't think that would be a Good Thing. > The fastest SH machine I know of is a Dreamcast, and that is still > slow (200Mhz, 16MB). Heh. Having an m68k buildd background, that is, well... you get the idea ;-) What you'd need is a few (say, 3 to 5; although we'd need more initally to bootstrap a fully-functional sid environment) Dreamcast machines with some sort of an Ethernet network connection (do those exist?) and a kernel that will not hang when it tries to swap over the network (there are some patches out there that allow this); you could then put them next to a file- or diskserver, and start building. Granted, this is likely not optimal, but that doesn't mean it won't work. Yes, a Dreamcast is getting slow by today's standards; but so are many of the architectures Debian supports; m68k is one, but MIPS, ARM, and SPARC (as opposed to sparc64) aren't the fastest systems anymore either; still, they're all supported. Speed is not an issue for autobuilders. They're non-interactive anyway (except when things break every once in a while), so if they're too slow, you just add more and be done with it. If you don't have enough diskspace, you add diskspace "somewhere" on the network. If you don't have enough RAM, you add swapspace. [...I know *@!# about the SH ABI...] If someone makes a decision regarding these issues, sets up some basic SH machines, and gives me a shell account, then I could install buildd, configure it, and get it running; if that happens today (heh, yeah right ;-), we could be building SH binaries by tomorrow. Consider this a standing offer to help out :-) -- Wouter Verhelst Debian GNU/Linux -- http://www.debian.org Nederlandstalige Linux-documentatie -- http://nl.linux.org "Stop breathing down my neck." "My breathing is merely a simulation." "So is my neck, stop it anyway!" -- Voyager's EMH versus the Prometheus' EMH, stardate 51462.
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