Re: MIPS support

[Vincent Legoll <vincent.legoll@gmail.com>]

Hello,

> In the intervening years, interest faded away as free software friendly
> MIPS hardware became more rare.

I grabbed a gnubee during the crowdfunding campaign, but the CPU
is too low spec to do a lot of compilation on it.

> Perhaps it would be more honest to officially remove the MIPS port now?
>
> Technically that would involve removing it from the manual, from
> configure.ac, and little more.

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 ?

> If there’s a need for it in the future, and developments happening for
> MIPS in general (for the GNU tool chain, the kernel, etc.), then we can
> always start a new MIPS port.

The kernel side looks good enough to me, there's a lot of openwrt
running on mips and it looks well maintained.

> Until then, POWER9 and perhaps RISC-V seem to have more
> appeal to free software hackers.

I have grabbed an old power8, that I also intend to put guix on.

> What do people think?

I may not be able to put huge time in it so won't ask you to keep it
just for me.

I'll restart working / trying things in the foreign archs area after my
list of pending things is drained a bit (guix-install.sh & tarball CI,
native-inputs lint warning chasing) but that's only wishful thinking
for now.

-- 
Vincent Legoll