Re: Arm bof and raspbian.

[Michael Cree <mcree@orcon.net.nz>]

On Sat, Aug 17, 2013 at 12:10:16AM +0100, peter green wrote:
> One possibility if there is someone sufficiently interested* in unstable
> for the Pi would be to use ports.debian.net for that and keep
> raspbian.org for testing and stable (for various reasons having a
> derivative of unstable and a derivative of testing in the same repo
> opens up a lot of nasty corner cases).

If it is decided that it would be useful to have R-PI building at
debian-ports I would be interested in hosting and running a buildd. I am
already running an Alpha buildd and watching the release mail list and
IRC to keep up with the necessary package rebuilds/binNMUs, so running
another buildd (or two) for something else would not be too much extra
work.  I am also finding myself using ARM based systems more now and
have two Pis at work we are kinda playing around with, and would not
mind getting involved in ARM porting work.

Note that debian-ports provides both unstable and experimental and with
unstable also has unreleased where porters can upload fixed packages for
use while waiting for package maintainers to apply their patches.  I find
that some packages maintainers do check debian-ports to see if their
packages are building, so if Pi unstable was there build failures would
be in the view of those package maintainers who do check.  (There are also
maintainers who appear not to give a damn about ports; oh well, that's
what unreleased is for.)

I would presume though that to be hosted at debian-ports a new
architecture tag would be needed to avoid confusion with armhf.  Indeed,
do you get many bug reports that result from people having added in armhf
from Debian (or Ubuntu, etc.) into apt sources not realising it is not
compatible with the Pi?

And how do you detect armv7 specific cpu instructions when you build
on armv7 infrastructure?  Is it possible to somehow limit a chroot to
trap on invalid armv6 instructions despite running on armv7?  Or do you
re-run test suites after successful builds on an actual Pi?

Cheers
Michael.