[GEM Development] GEM on Atari

[Alan Hourihane]

On Tue, 2009-01-06 at 14:47 +0000, Liam Proven wrote:
> 2009/1/5 Shane Gough <goughsw at gmail.com>:
> > Hi Alan,
> >
> > When you say 'Gentoo running on FreeMINT' what do you mean? I would
> > have thought that Gentoo (being a Linux based OS) would run directly
> 
> I think Alan is getting confused, and thus confusing the rest of us.

No, I'm not getting confused, and certainly not trying to confuse the
rest of you.

> Gentoo, as you say, is a Linux distribution: a complete OS based on
> the Linux kernel.

Gentoo/Alt 

http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/gentoo-alt/index.xml

> You can't run that on MiNT. It's not possible in any useful way.
>
> However, one of Gentoo's distinctive features is Portage, a
> source-based packaging system, derived in inspiration at least from
> the FreeBSD Ports system.

Right, which is what Gentoo/Alt is all about.

> (The other BSDs - NetBSD and OpenBSD - use something similar. I don't
> know about DragonflyBSD and PC-BSD has its own, different binary
> packing system, as well as Ports.)
> 
> It may be that someone is trying to implement Portage on Mint. That
> would be doable, although when I imagine the MiNT-based world is much
> slower-moving than that of x86 Free software, I don't see a lot of
> point.

I've ported Portage to FreeMiNT and it's working very well here.

> Secondarily, the point of Portage and of Gentoo in general is to
> compile from source on every machine. There are 2 reasons for this,
> neither of which apply on Atari & compatible hardware:
> 
> [1] x86 PC hardware is fast enough that recompilation is quick
> [2] There is such a diversity of PC hardware - CPUs alone in a dozen
> families or more - that significant performance improvements can be
> got from compiling with specific optimisations for each individual
> machine. E.g., on Intel alone, processors include
> 386dx/386sx/486slc/486dx/486dx2/486dx4/Pentium 1/MMX/Pro/2/3/4/4HT/4
> 64-bit/4 64-bit HT/Core/Core2/Core2Quad/Atom/Core i7. That's 20
> variants and I've not included 64-bit variants of everything since
> Core2. Add in buses, caches, chipsets, graphics chips, choice of Linux
> desktops, choice of version of GCC, choice of kernel, etc., and there
> are millions of permutations of PC.
>
> How many 68030-based ST-family machines are there? Half a dozen?

There is a 68060, 68040, 68030, 68020, 68000 for Atari architectures,
and that alone is reason enough for me to deal with.

Secondly, the advent of cross-compilers makes it much more viable too.

> So, with a small library of software, relatively slowly changing, on a
> small number of fairly fairly homogenous machines, where available
> processing power is so low that compilation will take hours, there
> really is no point in Portage that I can see.

Maybe from your point of view.

> A free, open, GPL, binary-based packing system with automatic
> dependency resolution built in from day 1 at a deep level, though,
> would be a boon. That means APT, which is all that, and runs on both
> .deb packages with DPKG and .rpm packages with RPM.

Another, from your point of view.

Alan.