Hi Ben, On Thu, Sep 12, 2024 at 07:56:09PM +0200, Ben Hutchings wrote: > It is trivial for us to add support for additional architectures once > they are minimally supported in upstream Linux (we may also require > that dpkg recognises their triplet; I'm not sure). There is no > requirement that we define a kernel configuration for the architecture > at the same time, or ever (see x32).
I understand that it is easy to add support for additional architectures. The tricky part here is that bootstrapping needs such support rather early and early tends to mean at a time where the dpkg architecture name and properties are not yet finalized. Having this support is crucial for performing test bootstraps and thus validating the dpkg triplet, so there is a chicken&egg problem here. As a result, bootstrapping has generally assumed that it needs to cater for adding support to the linux package and only bothering linux package maintainers once the architecture is known to dpkg. For doing that, the bootstrap tooling needs to know whether a prospective architecture is already supported by the linux source package or not. The necessary change in src:linux is then rather simple as you pointed out. > Can we assume that new Debian Linux ports will be able to satisfy that > or would that be a problem sometimes? It will be a problem in the common case. Helmut
