[fedora-arm] F9 for Openmoko Neo Freerunner?

[Lennert Buytenhek]

On Wed, Oct 01, 2008 at 03:38:29PM +0100, Philip Heron wrote:

> > Has anyone done any work on armv4?  Anyone interested in this idea?

I'm certainly interested in the idea.  There's still quite a bit more
ARMv4 hardware out there than I thought (although I myself haven't seen
any for quite some time now).


> There is a comment on the Fedora wiki which suggests this wouldn't be 
> that difficult:
> 
> "Although we do not provide such binaries, the sources also lend 
> themselves for building for pre-ARMv5TE hardware. The same is true for 
> big-endian CPUs." [1]
> 
> But where would we start?

The simple approach would be to just take all SRPMS in the f8/f9
distro, and do "rpmbuild --target armv4l foobar.src.rpm" for each of
them.

Unfortunately, that won't work 100%.

What sometimes happens is that if package foobar was built against some
version of libdependency, and libdependency was later upgraded a new
version that breaks the foobar build, then that won't be caught until
a new version of foobar is uploaded (or a security update needs to be
issued, etc).

(In Debian land, this is called a FTBFS (Fails To Build From Source) bug,
which tend to get a lot of attention.  When I bootstrapped Debian for
ARM EABI, I didn't really run into a lot of packages that had such issues,
but e.g. in Fedora 8 there were quite a number of them -- actually,
probably the most work involved in bootstrapping Fedora/ARM was dealing
with packages that wouldn't rebuild anymore even on x86.)

(Some googling does turn up this page: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FTBFS
-- so maybe it'll be easier for Fedora 9/10.)

The idea here is that if you are a secondary Fedora architecture, you
should build packages in the same order and with the same dependencies
and dependency versions as they were built with on x86.  Dennis Gilmore
wrote some tools that can do exactly this -- which should really be set
up for ARM as well.

Actually, I think Dennis has set up a koji instance for ARM, so if you
want to try to use this to rebuild f8 for armv4l, that would probably
be a good test of the system.  And it should dramatically reduce the
amount of work you'll need to do to get an ARMv4 Fedora up and running.