[Aboriginal] toolchain placement options

[Patrick Lauer]

On 11/28/2013 06:51 AM, Rob Landley wrote:
>> I guess if you are not planning to develop Aboriginal in direction of a
>> flexible build system this is fine by me.
> 
> I'm not turning it into a full-fledged distro. what I want to do is
> create bootstrap images for distros, so you can do a debian-boostrap and
> gentoo-bootstrap and fedora-bootstrap and so on that create a chroot
> within which their build tools will run to add more packages, building
> them from source and loading them into their repository on whatever the
> host happens to be. So if you want to create "slackware on sh4", you can
> do so.
> 
> Alas, that turns out to be a big job (gentoo assumes it's building under
> gentoo, _and_ every ebuild file in portage is annotated with the
> complete list of every target it's allowed to run on, so adding a new
> target to the portage tree requires touching just about every ebuild
> file in the tree because they weren't THINKING...)

Let me just disagree with you ;)

There's a very reasonable assumption that things will fail on a new
architecture, so it makes more sense to whitelist things when they have
been tested, patched and beaten into submission.
Blacklisting things is not good when you want everything to build,
because it's hard to get enough test coverage (build everything on HPPA?
You funny person ...) and to keep the blacklist updated for new versions
(Who would have guessed that Java/Icedtea still doesn't build on SPARC?)

(On a sidenote, if you are in a I-Don't-Care mode you can just tell
portage to accept anything - or that anything that works on x86 should
be ok too. But that's Not A Good Idea :) )

And luckily your "Gentoo needs Gentoo" claim has been undermined over
the years, first by Gentoo Prefix (which even works on win32 and other
mad platforms) and lately by RAP ("RAP ain't Prefix") which started as
an experiment on Android (
http://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Project:Android/build )

Have fun,

Patrick

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