Re: [gentoo-dev] Of Mips and Devs [Was: Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January]

[Stuart Longland]

Kumba wrote:
> Mike Frysinger wrote:
>>
>> that certainly sounds reasonable to me.  if the stable cant be
>> maintained, let the common workflow of developers transition it back
>> to ~arch until someone has the time to keep arch usable.  changing
>> profiles.desc accordingly should be done ahead of time.  perhaps a new
>> category for profiles.desc ?  "exp" for such ports ?  i could see all
>> *-fbsd ports being moved there.  tweak repoman to be less verbose
>> about dep issues for such profiles and we're set.
>
> Sounds like a plan.  'exp' would be the 'status' field?  I need to
> remove 2006.1, as that profile has been a big holdup due to it not being
> glibc-2.4 friendly (or one of the newer glibcs back in that era; I
> forget).  Even pondering just outright booting 2007.0, as I've been
> using 2007.1-dev since I commited it long ago, and haven't had an issue
> with it really.  I can then put 2008.0-dev together and use it as a
> launch platform for ~arch migration.

This is fine by me too.  At the moment, my 2007.1 stages are built with
stable keywords in mind, but that's something the user can easily fix. ;-)

>> i see dropping keywords as a very last resort.  getting a port *back*
>> into the tree is a *tremendous* amount of work (i went through it and
>> it was hell), while keeping ~arch alive is a sliver of effort and
>> generally not a blocker for package maintainers.
>
> Aye, I believe that was sh's removal and subsequent re-add?
>
> Part of the hangup lately has been our kernel support.  O2 systems are
> dead in the water in 2.6.24, and only work in 2.6.23 if you apply a hack
> to serial_core (a hack that only masks a problem rather than fixes it).
> Octane's I can still forward port, but with the upstream author having
> moved onto other interests, if something breaks badly enough from one
> version to the next, then I run the risk of getting stuck on a
> particular version permanently.

Lately, I've been slacking for the last few weeks... no excuses... I've
been concentrating on other projects and interests.

Part of this is that I've been trying to get µClibc stages going so we
can build some newer netboot images (at this point, I'm considering
doing a few bloated ones based on glibc) but thus far, I haven't been
successful.  I haven't bothered since my trip down to Gibraltar Ranges
National Park.

I've got one of the Lemote boxes building a userland that'll hopefully
become a LiveUSB image that'll allow a user to try out Gentoo on one of
these systems, and install it (by hand... although ultimately having the
Gentoo Installer would be good too).  At last check, it was building KDE
3.5.8.  Presently, the only way to install Gentoo, is to use my
precompiled kernel and stage3 tarball to boot the box using
Root-over-NFS, so I'd like to get this going properly soon.

My TODO list at present (no specific order):
o Build a new netboot image for Cobalt
o Rebuild my Qube2 using the 2007.1 stage3
o Build boot media for Lemote Fulong
o Test X11-related patches for Fulong on other MIPS systems to make sure
  they don't break anything (at some point, I'd like to see these
  systems supported out-of-the-box by Gentoo)
o Check the documentation is still accurate
o Clean up the bugzilla list

Kumba,
	Since you're otherwise busy with other things, did you want me to build
some new big-endian stages based on the 2007.1-dev profile?  If so,
could I get access to the SWARM?  (I could do it on my O2, but I think
the SWARM will easily outperform it.)
-- 
Stuart Longland (aka Redhatter)              .'''.
Gentoo Linux/MIPS Cobalt and Docs Developer  '.'` :
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   .'.'
http://dev.gentoo.org/~redhatter             :.'

I haven't lost my mind...
  ...it's backed up on a tape somewhere.