Re: [Buildroot] [PATCH 0/5] Add support for HPPA (PA-RISC)

From: "Vincent Stehlé via buildroot" <buildroot@buildroot.org>
To: Thomas Petazzoni <thomas.petazzoni@bootlin.com>
Cc: buildroot@buildroot.org, Julien Olivain <ju.o@free.fr>,
	Giulio Benetti <giulio.benetti@benettiengineering.com>,
	Romain Naour <romain.naour@gmail.com>
Subject: Re: [Buildroot] [PATCH 0/5] Add support for HPPA (PA-RISC)
Date: Sun, 1 Jun 2025 15:23:20 +0200	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <aDxUSIZRn7zXRavd@romuald.bergerie> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <20250530220409.5187b93a@windsurf>

On Fri, May 30, 2025 at 10:04:09PM +0200, Thomas Petazzoni wrote:
> Hello Vincent,
(..)
> I have nothing against HPPA, but is this going to be used in practice?

Dear Thomas,

Thank you for having a look.
In all honesty, no, I do not think this will be used much in practice,
except by me (and maybe a few HPPA fans?).

> We already support quite a lot of "exotic" architectures in Buildroot,
> and they are a fairly heavy maintenance burden, due to:
> 
> - Architecture dependencies in several core packages. For example,
>   libffi, libcap, are used by zillions of packages and they have
>   architecture dependencies.
> 
> - GCC issues. Our autobuilders are flooded by GCC issues affecting
>   SuperH, Microblaze and other exotic architectures, and those issues
>   are never fixed because nobody cares.
> 
> So while I find it nice that we support so many architectures, I think
> we should all wonder whether it makes sense to support even more and
> for what use-case.

This is a completely fair concern and I do realize that Buildroot
maintainers are already fairly busy; I certainly did not want to cause
any hassle with this patch series.

I just realized that HPPA looked still well supported in the essential
components and that it was easy enough to support in Buildroot (and
indeed this is worth only ~100 lines in the end).
Therefore, rather than keeping the patches locally I supposed that HPPA
could find a place in Buildroot with other now-exotic architectures such
as m68k or or1k.

Personally, I love the idea of Buildroot supporting as much of those old
architectures as possible, just for fun.
If this bothers you or other Buildroot developers, and you fear this
would harm Buildroot in the long run by wasting developers' time, I can
also understand; in which case, please feel free to just drop this patch
series (and the future v2).

Best regards,
Vincent.

> 
> Thanks for your feedback!
> 
> Thomas
> -- 
> Thomas Petazzoni, co-owner and CEO, Bootlin
> Embedded Linux and Kernel engineering and training
> https://bootlin.com
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