[Mageia-dev] We must port Mageia to ARM and PowerPC!

Thu Feb 24 17:43:02 CET 2011

Maarten Vanraes <maarten.vanraes at gmail.com> writes:
+
+> Op dinsdag 22 februari 2011 23:53:01 schreef André Machado:
+>> I was watching now and I realized that both mageia and Mandriva have ports
+>> for both i586 and x64 architetures.
+>> 
+>> When Mageia is released, she will compete directly with Mandriva, even
+>> though this is not your intention, Many Mandriva users will not want to
+>> migrate to Mageia and here is the clever.
+>> 
+>> Nowadays, they are increasingly common netbooks and tablets with ARM
+>> processors. In addition, there are still people with PowerPC Macs or
+>> PlayStations, which also use this processor.
+>> 
+>> If we port Mageia for these architectures, we can grab a larger share of
+>> users, including fans of Mandriva, which could run a distro similar to
+>> that love on machines that do not support it.
+>> 
+>> Of course, this is not a trivial task and maybe cannot be done right now
+>> but think in the short term, this should be viable and will help spread
+>> the distro. It should not be difficult to find someone who has a computer
+>> with these features and want to build the distro. Of course, Mageia
+>> Foundation is busy with Alpha1 and a port would require more tests. Maybe
+>> for next year? I ask what are the difficulties in doing this?
+>> 
+>> Of course we don't need have a large range of architetures such like Debian
+>> or NetBSD, but these - ARM and PowerPC - are essentials.
+>
+> iinm rtp (forgot real name, sorry) plans on doing ARM.
+
+Not only I plan to work on ARM but I'd like to work on ARM and MIPS,
+like I did at Mandriva. The MIPS port will arrive only after having ARM
+support in good shape. I've started to work on ARM but nothing to show
+atm.
+As regards powerpc, you'll have to find at least one persone who will
+maintain the port (more is preferred as it's a lot of work).
+Support for arches different than x86/x86_64 can only be there if there
+are real maintainers and testers because breakages happen really often
+there and get often unnoticed.
+
+Arnaud
+