on Thu, Nov 27, 2003 at 06:07:43PM +0000, Wookey wrote: > Do we have people who could free up more time for this stuff is someone paid > them to do it?
In principle, yes, I'm sure there are numerous people who would happily work on Debian/ARM if they were paid to do so. I don't think this would be unduly divisive: there have been plenty of instances in the past of people being paid to develop things either for Linux on ARM or for Debian. > Faster build/test hardware (e.g. a couple of Iyonix boxes - 600Mhz Xscale > with Hard drives)? Would that help? Probably not quite as much as you might think. We don't really have any shortage of autobuilder CPU time; the four existing machines are quite well able to keep up under normal circumstances. Debussy does sometimes get overloaded, but I don't think this is seriously impeding work on the port. > Maybe paying for some time spent on getting DI or embedded debian into > better shape. That would almost certainly speed things along a little. Right now I think d-i is the biggest problem we have. Not being able to install sarge would be a blow. So anything that helps with that has got to be good news. > 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. Yup. I don't think we have any serious problems here at the moment. ARM are already providing a fair amount of support for GCC. > 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? I haven't seen a great deal of demand for this. Although big-endian ARM systems certainly do exist, they tend to be aimed more at deeply embedded networking or control applications where Debian is unlikely to be the OS of choice anyway. I don't think a big-endian port would have enough users to justify the disk space in the archive or the manpower to create it. p.
