Re: [gentoo-dev] The status of the 'minor' arches in gentoo

[Markos Chandras]

On 17 February 2013 22:46, Anthony G. Basile <blueness@g.o> wrote:
> On 02/17/2013 11:03 AM, Agostino Sarubbo wrote:
>>
>> In the last time I'm helping some other arches (also arches which I have
>> no
>> interest) because they appears understaffed.
>>
>> Days ago, I tried to make a virtual machine with qemu, for SH since the
>> dev-
>> machine[1] is a bit slow; well, I discovered we have no ISO[2] available
>> and
>> there is no handbook[3] for it.
>>
>> The same thing is for S390/S390X/M68K/. So how I am able to install one of
>> that _supported_ arches if there isn't any sort of guide?
>>
>> An interesting fact is that we have an handbook for MIPS[4], a declared
>> unsupported architecture (does not make sense for me).
>
> I am supporting mips for the Lemote loongson2f and for the Atheros AR7161.
> I'm trying to get my hands on a godson and Stuart will be sending me two
> fulongs, which you can add to that list.  Don't let the fact that MIPS is a
> ~arch fool you.  I don't think we should make it a fully supported arch
> because of the number of ISA's and ABI's and endiannesses (if such a word
> exists).  It is impossible to test for all combos which is what stable
> should mean.
>
> So don't even think of dropping MIPS!  Just leave it ~arch and I'll give it
> love.

I agree with you. MIPS is not going away and the reason we only
support ~mips is like you said the vast diversity in hardware and
software components. But I think nobody said to drop MIPS right? ;)

>
> As far as the other arches go, I'm interested in: amd64, arm, mips, ppc,
> ppc64 and x86.

ppc and ppc64 used to lack manpower. They appear to be in a better
state now that Agostino is doing mass stabilisations for them, but I
am not sure if the packages are actually tested during runtime or they
are just tested for build problems.



-- 
Regards,
Markos Chandras - Gentoo Linux Developer
http://dev.gentoo.org/~hwoarang