Re: [Gnewsense-dev] Yeeloong arrived, let's hack

[Robert Millan]

On Fri, Feb 06, 2009 at 01:58:19AM +0100, avr wrote:
> > 
> > You're actually porting Ubuntu to MIPS?  I assume you're aware that porting 
> > a
> > huge codebase to an architecture it didn't support before requires a
> > significant amount of QA.
> 
> I'm using glibc, gcc and binutils from debian, which makes most of the pain 
> go away. And
> most of the software did actually support the architecture when it was still 
> in debian. So 
> the only problematic packages will be those where careless ubuntu patches 
> break stuff 
> specifically for mipsel. So far I've compiled 100's of them with very few 
> problems.

Yeah, but compiling is one thing and running is another.  I've seen runtime
portability bugs that render a package completely unusable live for several
years, and even make their way to stable releases, and that is on Debian
which supposedly has lots of people testing the code.

What I mean to say is that even if fixing bugs might be easy for a skilled
developer, finding them can be a real PITA when you don't have millions of
people testing everything in day-to-day usage.

-- 
Robert Millan

  The DRM opt-in fallacy: "Your data belongs to us. We will decide when (and
  how) you may access your data; but nobody's threatening your freedom: we
  still allow you to remove your data and not access it at all."