Hi, I'm meeting a Linux-friendly bigwig from ARM in a couple of weeks (when I'm back from my hols).
He's interesting in talking about how/if ARM should be helping Debian out given our support of their architecture. So - anything people would like me to put to him? We are clearly a bit short of manpower for things like dealing with major packages that don't work, often due to 'hard stuff' like compiler issues, and floating-point wierdness. Any suggestions for how we might deal with tings faster. (It's taken about 4 years to get Mozilla working properly for example). Do we have people who could free up more time for this stuff is someone paid them to do it? But would that be devisive - with someone get paid and most of us not. Any better ideas? Faster build/test hardware (e.g. a couple of Iyonix boxes - 600Mhz Xscale with Hard drives)? Would that help? Perhaps ARM supporting Debian the way HP do would be best - promoting it as vendor-neutral, using it where appropriate, perhaps sponsoring testing/certification type guff and generally just mucking in with fixing things? Maybe paying for some time spent on getting DI or embedded debian into better shape. That would almost certainly speed things along a little. ARM have apparently been doing good things with gcc too. Is the ARM gcc corner holding it's own? Phil? What would help you most? Things seem to be going quite well on that front to me with gcc 3.3 working pretty well these days. Another thing I was wondering about - which isn't directly related - is: do we need a big-endian version? Some newer ARM systems are defaulting to big-endian use, although most of them can run little-endian too. Is it worth doing a big-endian arch to support these directly or not? Presumably all big-endian arm people are building from source at the moment and if they are using debian at all it'll only be for source. So any and all suggestions welcome. I'm away from 1st to 15th so won't be replying. Wookey -- Aleph One Ltd, Bottisham, CAMBRIDGE, CB5 9BA, UK Tel +44 (0) 1223 811679 work: http://www.aleph1.co.uk/ play: http://www.chaos.org.uk/~wookey/
