Re: Removing ARCNET stuffs

["Kamil Rytarowski" <n54%gmx.com@localhost>]

Antti Kantee wrote:
> On 31/05/15 06:05, matthew green wrote:
> > hi Andrew! :)
> >
> >> Who is appalled to discover that pc532 support has been removed!
> 
> In addition to toolchain support, the hardware was near-extinct at the 
> time of removal.
> 
> Now, the hardware is no longer near-extinct:
> http://cpu-ns32k.net/
> 
> I used the FPGA pc532 running NetBSD 1.5.x(?) a few weeks back. 
> Unbelievable experience, especially since I spent quite some time and 
> effort trying to get a pc532 I had on loan 10+ years ago to function.
> 
> > get your GCC and binutils and GDB pals to put the support back
> > in the toolchain and we'll have something to talk about :-)
> 
> Didn't know that things to *talk* about were short in supply...
> 

I was looking for the so called open-source resources of pc532. Can we
put it somewhere on the web again? Last time I was checking (not so long
ago) and they were off-line.

At the moment I'm focused on acorn26, I obtained RISCOS. This port should
be saved to put fun into the computing. I work at work with newer
ARM CPUs, but the basic ideas are the same in ARMv2/v3 (IRQ, FIQ, RISC,
etc) - this isn't only fun but also good for learning - even though I
will be just in the platform emulator.

Personally (sorry for this) I don't like pcc, so I started clank [1], a
clang/llvm clone in plain C with the goal of minimal possible footprint,
supporting exclusively the C language, being portable (-lnbcompat) and
with interchangeable with clang/llvm compiler parts - being as close
to the original as possible to track upstream...
I want to save sun2, deC++ base (as the MK option) and in general get
acquainted with the llvm internals. This is rather long-term project
just in a spare time. Lost of time? Probably, but even in this very
early stage I can catch places for enhancement in the big-brother
clang/llvm [2].

David, forking NetBSD? Usually teams are more powerful than individuals
and they win at end. Forks are valuable only then when they will attract
new people and submit patches back to upstream -- this is a relation
between DragonflyBSD and FreeBSD. There is also EdgeBSD [3] a good project
to prototype features in git.

I can see a market share in desktops, I belive we need better support for
recent DE, graphical installer (calamares.io is my choice for a NetBSD
livecd with preinstalled packages). As someone already stated, if we
aren't on desktops we aren't anywhere else. I saw that companies put
Ubuntu (ubuntu-core) even on your PCI peripherals, just because people are
familiar with this system. This is the reason why I'm for winning back
desktop.

What to do to make the project easier for newcomers - from a stand point
of a new wannabe developer? Improving the contribution platform - well,
I am aware of the fact that people are used to the same techniques like
in nineties and have the standards set in stone.

I can see the following problems:
- no central location for patches -- several mailing-lists, PR,
  private-mails..
- no way to track pending patches -- except pinging developers..
- no standard patch format - extra work on developers to maintain it

My proposition is (expressed already before) to set official GitHub
mirror and accept there patches and issues at dedicated git branches.
I almost stopped to contribute my patches to projects if they are outside
GitHub, mailing lists are extra burden to register an account, track
traffic, spam and general noise. With the GitHub platform the cost of
maintainership will be higher on start and quite low later. No need
for extra internal infrastructure except scheduled cvs2git script.

[1] https://github.com/krytarowski/clank
[2] http://lists.cs.uiuc.edu/pipermail/llvm-commits/Week-of-Mon-20150209/258953.html
[3] http://edgebsd.org/