Re: cortex-m support?

[Rich Felker <dalias@libc.org>]

On Thu, Dec 08, 2016 at 01:10:11PM -0600, Rob Landley wrote:
> On 12/07/2016 07:16 PM, Rich Felker wrote:
> > On Wed, Dec 07, 2016 at 06:55:56PM -0600, Rob Landley wrote:
> >> Not sure where you get the relevant gcc patch...
> > 
> > I have links to the repos somewhere; the problem is that they're
> > forked from a fairly old gcc version (although not nearly as bad as
> > sh-fdpic; I think it's 4.8 or so)
> 
> https://github.com/mickael-guene/gcc has a 5.2 branch and "master"
> updated 20 hours ago, although I'm not sure how much of master updating
> is an automatic tracking branch and how much is the account owner
> updating things.

Excellent! That's new since I last communicated with him.

> > and the authors probably don't have
> > copyright assignments taken care of.
> 
> Nobody does copyright assignments voluntarily. In the long run those
> kill projects.

I don't want to start an unrelated GNU-politics thread, but I think
you're mistaken here. Any modification of a GNU package will die out
in the long run without copyright assignment, because nobody can
maintain stuff out-of-tree forever. If it's an individual they'll lose
interest; if it's a company their business interests will change or
they'll get bought out by someone who doesn't care. In my opinion this
is 100% the FSF's fault for creating such a broken system, but it's
the reality. So people who modify GNU stuff and who do want their work
to live on and be useful in the future really should be pushing to get
their employers' to authorize the assignments.

> > It would be really nice if
> > someone could coordinate working with the authors and companies
> > involved and getting all of that taken care of -- preferably someone
> > getting paid to do so, since it's not particularly fun work to be
> > doing as a volunteer.
> 
> Github says https://github.com/mickael-guene was last active November
> 30th (commiting stuff to his cortex-m simulator fork), so he's still
> around...
> 
> I'm tempted to try to shoehorn the gcc and binutils here into
> musl-cross-make and see what happens. But I've already _got_ a cortex-m
> targeted toolchain that... can't build musl. Because of the assembly
> stuff. So I should probably poke at that first.

This is really good news -- I think adding the patches should be easy.
You can probably just diff his tree against stock 5.2.0 and make it
one big combined patch. This makes getting stuff ready on the musl
side a lot more attractive to me, so I will try to get back to is
asap.

Rich