Re: Hello from powerpc

[ludo@gnu.org (Ludovic Courtès)]

Hello Carlos!

csanchezdll@gmail.com (Carlos Sánchez de La Lama) skribis:

> Slowly progressing, quite busy with lately. I will try to address
> pending comments on patches I already sent (and which are required for
> powerpc support) before sending the new ones. There is nothing really
> complex, the patches are rather simple (as usual, once you know what to
> patch ;) )

:-)

>> Ideally we’d provide binaries for that architecture, but for that we’d
>> need at the very least two build machines.  Do you have an idea as how
>> we could get donations for that?  Perhaps we could discuss it with the
>> Talos folks, they may be interested in having more free software
>> developers working on PPC.
>
> I don't really have any ideas. I work in a tech startup which has
> nothing to do with GUIX, so no luck here. My interest in GUIX is purely
> personal. About asking the Talos people, I wonder how much sense it does
> as their product is powerpc64 and what I have bootstrapped is
> powerpc32. I feel powerpc32 is almost dead now (I even read today Debian
> is dropping support on next Debian 9) so it only has interest for those
> having an old machine around. It might have some users on the embedded
> market (there are still some FPGAs with powerpc cores inside AFAIK), but
> I wont expect getting much industrial support/donations.

OK, fine.  So maybe we’ll keep it as an unofficial port, until/unless we
find out that there’s more demand that we thought out there.

>> If we fail to do that, I think we’ll can still have the patches in but
>> prominently mark the platform as “unofficially supported” or something
>> along these lines (like Debian does).  If after a couple of years the
>> situation hasn’t improved, we might want to discuss whether to drop
>> it.
>
> That would be enough, for starters, I think. Making it "unofficially
> supported" and see how much interest it brings. Maybe Debian dropping
> powerpc support makes all those powerpc users around look at GUIX to
> keep their systems up-to-date.

OK!

>> Does cross-compilation to powerpc-linux-gnu work in current master?
>> If/when it does, we can ask Hydra to cross-build a few things, like we
>> already do for other targets:
>
> Not in current master, I think. At least some minor patches are
> required. Anyways, rebuilding the bootstrap binaries is not so hard
> (they are cross-build, so I do it in a bigger x86 machine), but
> everytime the bootstrap binaries change, everything must be rebuilt on
> the target machine as they are root to all dependency graphs (am I
> correct on this?). That's why I would like to "fix" the bootstrap
> binaries (like on current supported targets, where bootstrap binaries
> were generated some time ago and actual binaries have not changed
> since).
>
> In any case, I think first step is have the patches needed for bootstrap
> generation in master, then generate the binaries, and at that point we
> can fix them.

Sure, I’ll wait for the patches then.  :-)

When we’re done, I think it’d be great if you could write a blog entry
for the web site to report on your experience porting Guix, and to
encourage interested hackers into using the port and contributing to it.

Thanks!

Ludo’.