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

From: Ludovic Courtès <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 17 Apr 2021 18:04:02 +0200

Hi!

Efraim Flashner <[email-masked]> skribis:

> https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/guix.git/log/?h=wip-ppc
>
> The wip-ppc branch on Savannah is currently in a good state. With the
> recent rapid churn on core-updates I haven't been very quick about
> rebasing on core-updates but I can confirm that building out to mesa
> works. Building is slow, it took 6 days to build from guile-final to
> mesa without stopping.
>
> The patches start with adding the bootstrap binaries for powerpc.

Woohoo!

>  gnu/build/vm.scm                              |    1 +
>  gnu/local.mk                                  |    2 +
>  gnu/packages/base.scm                         |   11 +-
>  gnu/packages/bootstrap.scm                    |   37 +-
>  gnu/packages/commencement.scm                 |   21 +-
>  gnu/packages/debug.scm                        |    2 +
>  gnu/packages/disk.scm                         |   44 +
>  gnu/packages/gl.scm                           |   18 +-
>  gnu/packages/guile.scm                        |   21 +-
>  gnu/packages/nss.scm                          |    7 +-
>  .../patches/mac-fdisk-gentoo-patchset.patch   |  866 +++++++
>  gnu/packages/patches/mac-fdisk-p18.patch      | 2070 +++++++++++++++++
>  gnu/packages/version-control.scm              |    6 +-
>  guix/packages.scm                             |    4 +-
>  m4/guix.m4                                    |    4 +-
>  15 files changed, 3096 insertions(+), 18 deletions(-)
>  create mode 100644 gnu/packages/patches/mac-fdisk-gentoo-patchset.patch
>  create mode 100644 gnu/packages/patches/mac-fdisk-p18.patch

I haven’t looked into details so I’ll just share thoughts from a
maintenance viewpoint:

  1. Those fdisk patch file names will make ‘guix lint’ unhappy.  :-)

  2. Apart from mac-fdisk-p18.patch, which looks relatively big, the
     changes seem to be rather non-intrusive, so it’s tempting to merge
     them (on ‘core-updates’ I guess?).

  3. OTOH, what will be the status of this architecture?  I don’t think
     new 32-bit PPC hardware is being made (right?), so I guess we
     probably won’t have substitutes for that architecture.  That means
     it won’t be supported at the same level as other architectures and
     may quickly suffer from bitrot.

I’m torn between #2 and #3.

What do people think?

Thanks,
Ludo’.