official packages for arm?

[Nathan Whitehorn]

There are no longer any packages for any non-x86 architecture as a 
result of the security breach last year. There are basically three 
reasons for this:
1. The old package build infrastructure got abandoned.
2. The new scheme requires one giant machine to build all the packages, 
which is hard for ARM.
3. There seems to be some policy that package-build latency should be 
less than a day or two for security reasons, which is hard without huge 
numbers of CPUs.

These aren't that hard to fix.

There are two ways to fix (2). There has been a bunch of effort from 
many people in being able to cross-build packages. An alternative is to 
distribute the builds over a cluster, which I've been doing for 32-bit 
PPC (thanks to clusteradm@ providing some resources!). That works well, 
and if ARM hardware appeared in the cluster, it would be easy to set 
that up tomorrow. From the OS development side, native builds are nice 
because they stress-test the operating system in a way that cross-builds 
don't.

Fixing (3) requires a policy change. I think the easiest would be a 
Tier-1/Tier-2 thing like for the base system. x86 packages are 
guaranteed to get prompt security updates and have more paranoid 
validation. Tier-2 might be slower, or built on non-centrally controlled 
hardware, or whatever.
-Nathan

On 07/04/14 09:21, Tom Everett wrote:
> How much hardware does it actually need?  For that matter, how do the 
> other architectures handle this problem?
>
>
>
> On Fri, Jul 4, 2014 at 10:12 AM, Nathan Whitehorn 
> <nwhitehorn at freebsd.org <mailto:nwhitehorn at freebsd.org>> wrote:
>
>     On 07/04/14 03:25, Anton Shterenlikht wrote:
>
>         Few silly questions, please don't shoot.
>
>         1. Why are there no official arm packages?
>         Lack of interest from users?
>         Lack of volunteers maintaining the arm portscluster
>         infrastructure?
>         The fact that arm is actually several implementations
>         (RPI, wandboard, etc. OABI vs EABI)?
>
>
>     The basic issue is that building packages takes a lot of CPU time
>     (it's about a CPU-month with moderately fast CPUs) and the project
>     doesn't have the hardware to do it.
>     -Nathan
>
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>
> -- 
> A better world shall emerge based on faith and understanding  - 
> Douglas MacArthur