Re: [gentoo-dev] splitting out arm keywords

[Ruud Koolen]

On Wednesday 09 July 2014 03:48:40 Matthew Thode wrote:
> arm has a historical problem with stabilization, while keywording
> doesn't require access to all arm sub-arches the problem with the
> stabilization slowness causes running a full ~arm to become hard.  By
> that I mean that if someone keywords something for arm because it works
> on armv7 and I run ~arm because stabilization takes forever then my
> system may break because of both non-stabilized packages and because I
> could be running armv6.

So how common is it for a package to work correctly on armv7 but break on 
armv6? As far as I can see, splitting the keywords is a good idea if and only 
if this is common.

> In any case I propose splitting out arm into armv4, armv5, armv6 and
> armv7.  armv8 seems to be here already as arm64.

Do you foresee ~armv4 and ~armv5 keywords actually showing up in practice?

> I think this would be beneficial because of not all developers that want
> to help with arm have or what all the sub-arches necessary.  It also
> allows us to move faster on stabilization because most of us have access
> to armv7 a bit easier.  This would take some pressure off of the people
> doing stabilization for older sub-arches, but not much.
>
>
> Some issues that need solving are as follows.
>
> [hard|soft]float differences.  what stabilization means would need to be
> clarified a bit here.

The same issue as above applies. Do packages commonly break or unbreak 
depending on hardfloat versus softfloat?

-- Ruud