Linux-libre 5.8 and beyond

[Vagrant Cascadian <vagrant@debian.org>]

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Thanks for updating linux-libre to 5.7!

I saw the 5.8 was out, and gave a quick shot at updating it, but it hung
python indefinitely during the deblobbing process. I also tried
switching to python 3 instead of python 2, but it had the same
issue. Apparently this is a known issue:

  https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/info-gnu/2020-08/msg00001.html

When I tried switching deblob to use gawk instead, it produced the
cleaned tarball, but resulted in syntax errors when building
linux-libre.

So I asked a bit in #linux-libre on freenode and they wondered why we
don't use the git repository instead of running the deblob scripts again
in guix.

One of the issues might be that linux-libre may occasionally remove
releases that accidentally contained non-free code breaking guix's
ability to build old versions. Not sure exactly where guix's balance
between functional package management and software freedom interplays
there.

That said, using their git repository could allow guix to take advantage
of the software heritage as a fallback; though I'm not quite sure how
well that would work with removed versions.

Downloading the git repository of a project as large as linux-libre
every time is probably somewhat expensive. Though the process of
deblobbing in guix is also quite expensive...


There's more debugging to do (and admittedly, wrapping my head around
the deblobbing code in linux.scm is a bit difficult) and the linux-libre
folks are somewhat interested to figure out what exactly is wrong with
the process building on guix.


Not sure how much time I can throw at it, but curious what others think!


live well,
  vagrant

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