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

[Matt Turner <mattst88@gentoo.org>]

On Mon, May 5, 2014 at 10:29 AM, Markos Chandras <hwoarang@gentoo.org> wrote:
> 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.

I wouldn't mind reducing this to every 6 months or so. It was
certainly a "when I felt like it" schedule for me.

>> 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.

It was my experience that fixing the ~arch issues was something that
you did once for every batch of stages. You just reused the fixed up
portage snapshot for everything. It wasn't a trivial effort by any
means though.

>> 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?

Once a year for stages with questionable usefulness seems reasonable to me.