Bug#908787: packaging pgpio for Debian

[peter green <plugwash@p10link.net>]

On 18/10/18 20:36, peter green wrote:
> Hi
>
> I have been looking at getting pigpio into Debian.
Time for an update

Upstream accepted a pull request to give the libraries proper sonames.

I then added raspberry pi detection code.

I then decided to test if pigpio could be used on a Debian arm64 system. The first thing I ran into was a bunch of issues about assuming that pointers were four bytes in size causing a bunch of scary compiler warnings. I worked through those warnings. fixing them.

I then had to expand the raspberry pi detection code, 64-bit kernels unfortunately don't put the same information in cpuinfo as 32-bit ones do.

I have just submitted a pull request for the above issues.

However I then ran into a more significant issue. Pigpio relies heavilly on DMA and to set this up it relies on a kernel driver that has not been upstreamed. So pigpio is not compatible with Debian kernels.

I would therefore propose for now packaging only the client components of pigpio in Debian. What do others think?