Re: [gentoo-mips] Reducing the number of the MIPS supported stages

[Markos Chandras <hwoarang@gentoo.org>]

On 05/05/2014 06:22 PM, Matt Turner wrote:
> On Mon, May 5, 2014 at 7:06 AM, Markos Chandras <hwoarang@gentoo.org> wrote:
>> Hi all,
>>
>> Right now the number of stages for each endianness is 8:
>>[...]
> 
> Do we need r1 and r2 stages?

Why not? r2 has been around ~10 years. But r1 devices are still present.

> 
>>
>> ==> 16 stages in total.
>>
>> This takes quite a bit of time for all stages to be built (by the time
>> everything is built, we are one month passed the time the snapshot was
>> taken). How about stop building stages for mips1, mips3 and mips4?
> 
> How often are you building stages?
Roughly every 3 months.

> 
> Resources aren't a problem but it takes a month to build everything?
Well, my free time is also limited so it's not just the resources that
may or may not cause some problem :) Preparing catalyst and solving
blockers in ~arch takes a considerable amount of my Gentoo time.

> Don't you have a 16 or 32-core build system? Cavium gave me ssh access
> to one that I was planning to build stages on, but I never tried.
> 
> I guess I don't understand the problem you're facing.
> 

My question (and not a problem) is whether building stages for old ISAs
is desired or not. If it is, then that's fine. If not, then maybe we can
stop building stages or maybe we can build them once a year? Like you
said, with the additions of newer ISAs (like -r3) the total number of
stages will grow even more. I think we are the arch with the most stages
in Gentoo, which is a great thing(!) but maybe we can reconsider our
options, and make room for newer ISAs and variants?

-- 
Regards,
Markos Chandras