[fedora-arm] F9 for Openmoko Neo Freerunner?

[Phil]

People,


Lennert Buytenhek wrote:
> 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).


Both versions of the Openmoko product sold out pretty quickly and they 
haven't even started selling to ordinary consumers yet!


>> 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.


I was thinking of just doing a "minimalist" development to start with - 
ie a basic, with networking, without X, system with as few packages as 
possible.  Then, once that is going to add other packages on demand . .


> 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.)


Maybe we should only be worrying about Fedora 10? - by the time we get 
all the packages going, 10 should have already been released . .


> 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.


Sounds like a good idea in principle but I don't need most of the 
packages and I really just want to see if the idea is viable . .


> 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.


I am happy to have a go if I can get help from this list and I have the 
OM Freerunner waiting to have something tested on it!

Regards,

Phil.
-- 
Philip Rhoades

GPO Box 3411
Sydney NSW	2001
Australia
E-mail:  phil at pricom.com.au