Subject: Re: bug#47615: [PATCH 0/9] Add 32-bit powerpc support

From: Ludovic Courtès <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 11 May 2021 22:24:03 +0200

Hi!

Efraim Flashner <[email-masked]> skribis:

> How about changing the mips64el documentation to say that there is
> minimal support for the two architectures, with no substitutes, and may
> be fun for tinkerers with the hardware. Then we could also change the
> check in the guix.m4 to add mips64el-linux as supported in case anyone
> does actually want to play with it.

No, not as “supported”, I surely don’t want to deal with mips64el-linux
bugs.  :-)

> Current text:
>
> @item mips64el-linux (deprecated)¬
> little-endian 64-bit MIPS processors, specifically the Loongson series,
> n32 ABI, and Linux-Libre kernel.  This configuration is no longer fully
> supported; in particular, there is no ongoing work to ensure that this
> architecture still works.  Should someone decide they wish to revive this
> architecture then the code is still available.
>
> Proposed text:
>
> @item Alternative architectures
> In addition to architectures which are actually supported there are a
> few formally unsupported architectures which may be of interested to
> tinkerers. Namely mips64el-linux, little-endian 64-bit MIPS processors,
> specifically the Loongson series, n32 ABI, and powerpc-linux, big-endian
> 32-bit POWER processors, specifically the PowerPC 74xx series. There are
> no installation tarballs, substitutes or promises that these
> architectures are functional.
>
> And then I'd move it lower than the powerpc64le-linux entry.

Maybe it’s more readable to keep it as a bullet list, like:

  @item mips64el-linux (@emph{unsupported})
  …

  @item powerpc-linux (@emph{unsupported})
  …

with a sentence explaining what “unsupported” means.

IMO guix.m4 should either require --with-courage or emit a prominent
warning for these.

WDYT?

Thanks,
Ludo’.