Gentoo Archives: gentoo-dev

From: Sam James <sam@g.o>
To: gentoo-dev@l.g.o, ia64@g.o
Subject: [gentoo-dev] Itanium (IA64) port: call for help
Date: Thu, 27 Jan 2022 18:22:25
Message-Id: F4A05F94-6C88-4328-82F5-30169EC7B311@gentoo.org
1 Hi all,
2
3 TL;DR: We really need help! There aren't many developers in Gentoo
4 Currently interested in working on Itanium. Come hang around in #gentoo-ia64
5 on libera.chat (IRC) if you're interested in helping.
6
7 As discussed in the recent Gentoo Council meeting [0], concerns were raised
8 about the status of Itanium (IA64) and I agreed to write to gentoo-dev to
9 assess the level of interest & put out a call for volunteers.
10
11 What we need from volunteers is at least one of the following:
12 - Package testers to perform "keywording" (verifying a package compiles and ideally
13 passes tests on IA64)
14 - An advocate for the arch/port (it's hard to be motivated for
15 something not working unless we know _someone_ out there is affected
16 or cares)
17 - Possibly general work on reporting bugs upstream, triaging failures,
18 and even trying to fix them where possible (but it's okay to not
19 be an expert in IA64 internals).
20 - Folks simply using IA64 on Gentoo to let us know!
21 - Anything else if you think it'd help the port effort.
22
23 But ultimately, if you're using IA64, you can help in some way.
24
25 There were rumours of GCC support being deprecated (and subsequent
26 removal) [2][3] but this does NOT appear to have happened so far [4].
27
28 It might be worth a volunteer could investigate setting up
29 CI for GCC upstream (and possibly glibc if they need it).
30
31 Gentoo does have a machine ("guppy") for performing development
32 work on, but we need people to actually use it.
33
34 (This is a good time to note that friends and users of "alternative
35 hardware" are welcome to join e.g. #gentoo-ia64, #gentoo-alpha,
36 #gentoo-arm, #gentoo-hppa, #gentoo-sparc, and #gentoo-embedded too!)
37
38 [0] https://projects.gentoo.org/council/meeting-logs/20220109-summary.txt
39 [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/Gentoo/comments/s0emlj/trying_to_boot_latest_ia64_release/
40 [2] https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Intel-IA-64-GCC-Deprecation
41 [3] https://gcc.gnu.org/legacy-ml/gcc/2019-06/msg00125.html
42 [4] https://gcc.gnu.org/git/?p=gcc.git&a=search&h=HEAD&st=commit&s=ia64
43
44 best,
45 sam

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Re: [gentoo-dev] Itanium (IA64) port: call for help Sam James <sam@g.o>