Re: Preliminary 'wip-armhf' branch pushed

[Mark H Weaver]

Hi John,

John Darrington <address@hidden> writes:

> On Wed, Dec 31, 2014 at 02:23:30PM -0500, Mark H Weaver wrote:
>      
>      John Darrington <address@hidden> writes:
>      > It would seem then, that the only difference between the wip-arm and
>      > the wip-armhf branches is the value of the --with-fpu flag.
>      
>      That is not even close to the truth, as anyone who actually looks at the
>      branches (or tries to build them) can easily see.  John, I appreciate
>      your preliminary work on 'wip-arm', and I credited you in the final
>      patch on 'wip-armhf', but you didn't get very far.
>
> No I didn't.   I didn't think it worth even creating a branch, but civodul 
> asked me to.
> So I was surprised and disappointed that nobody wanted to help take it 
> further.

Initially, I hoped to build upon your branch instead of starting a new
one.  However, when I took a close look, I found that there was not a
single hunk of your initial commit (0386b83a2) that I could use:

* You called the system 'armel-linux', but I preferred to save that name
  for a possible soft-float system analogous to Debian's 'armel' port.

* You used the triplet 'armel-linux-gnueabihf'.  I tried that, but found
  that a great many copies of 'config.sub' in the wild fail to recognize
  'armel' as the machine name when there is also a company name in the
  triplet.  After a few experiments with other triplets, I settled on
  'arm-linux-gnueabihf', which is what Debian uses.

* You chose higher FPU requirements than Debian, and tuned compiles for
  cortex-a9.  I'm open to discussing these choices, but without careful
  research I'd be more inclined to follow Debian's lead.

* You added "CFLAGS=-Wno-cast-qual" and "--disable-werror" for ARM in
  'gcc-configure-flags-for-triplet', which I thought was a bad idea and
  didn't belong there.

* You patched gcc/config/arm/linux-eabi.h unnecessarily.

Given that every piece of your foundation needed modification, it didn't
seem to make sense to build on it.

> You said your branch also wasn't ready, that's why I haven't tried to
> build it.  From your description, I wasn't clear what your branch
> achieves that my attempt doesn't.

'wip-armhf' is well on its way to building native bootstrap tarballs on
my Novena board.  Given the many problems in the early bootstrap that I
had to fix along the way, it is clear that 'wip-arm' in it's current
state wouldn't get very far.

       Mark