Re: MIPS support

["Ludovic Courtès" <ludo@gnu.org>]

Hey!

Efraim Flashner <efraim@flashner.co.il> skribis:

> On Mon, May 18, 2020 at 12:12:24AM +0200, Ludovic Courtès wrote:
>> Hi,
>> 
>> Leo Famulari <leo@famulari.name> skribis:
>> 
>> > On Wed, May 06, 2020 at 06:27:31PM +0200, Vincent Legoll wrote:
>> >> From the manual or from the CI, to let the build farm do more useful things
>> >> I'm not against, but is it really making maintenance difficult by still being in
>> >> the codebase ?
>> >
>> > It's not really a maintenance burden currently since we don't actually
>> > build or maintain the Guix on MIPS at all.
>> >
>> > I think this discussion is evidence that people find the situation a bit
>> > confusing. When I am looking into a project, I find it demotivating to
>> > read documentation about features that may or may not work — it's best
>> > when the documentation accurately reflects what the software can do.
>> 
>> Right, that was my point: let’s remove mentions of MIPS from the manual
>> and from ‘configure.ac’ so people have the right expectations.
>> 
>> Thoughts?
>
> So change it so that mips needs '--with-courage' but not remove the
> bootstrap binaries from the code?

Yes.  (The code has references to those binaries but it no longer has
the binaries themselves.)

> Do we want to fully remove the mention of mips as a supported platform
> or change it to "in the past we had an active mips64el port which is
> in need of more attention to bring it back to a fully supported
> platform. Help wanted!"

Do we really want to call for help in this area?  To me, we just remove
it, and if there’s interest again in this architecture, people might
happily find that part of the work has already been done.

Would you like to send a patch?

Ludo’.