I didn't get any feedback from the relevant maintainers, so I decided to just go ahead and submit the ARM gcc and glibc package diffs to BZ: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=246800 https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=246801 I've included a backport of the upstream fix for gcc PR30486, which fixes the ARM EABI fortran bootstrap, so we now have gcc-gfortran packages as well. It's not very likely that people would want to use ARM systems for their nuclear weapons simulations, but at least it brings the selection of available packages closer to what's in x86 Fedora, which is a Good Thing. Also, since our ARM changes are in rpm 4.4.2.1-rc1, I've BZ'd that as well: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=246803 I'm not entirely sure what it takes to get someone to look at our BZs. We might have to start bribing package maintainers (say, with large quantities of various alcoholic beverages) at some point. Looking beyond getting the ARM diffs into Fedora, I'm very interested in things like footprint optimisation, cross compiling, and such. I posted initial diffs for a cross-gcc package from Fedora sources to fedora-devel-list@ recently. A set of i386 RPMS for an arm cross-toolchain is available here: http://www.wantstofly.org/~buytenh/cross/ It's still somewhat experimental (for example, I'm not entirely satisfied yet about the sysroot handling), but it works well enough to cross-compile an ARM kernel, and it manages to cross-compile a native ARM gcc (i.e. build=i386 host=arm target=arm cross build) as well. Eventually, we'd like to be able to cross-build entire RPMS. Also, I've started collecting patches to break e.g. the python- dependent parts of packages off into separate subpackages, and patches to allow rebuilding packages with less dependencies (e.g. to not pull in libselinux), etc. Packaging things like eglibc and dropbear is also on the list. Since a lot of these patches aren't likely to go into Fedora soon, I'm looking into a way of making maintaining sets of diffs against Fedora sources easier. In essence, to have local branches of the distro, e.g. a "cross branch" with diffs to make various packages cross-compile-able, a "footprint branch" with diffs to reduce package footprint/dependencies, and such. (Judging by the uptake of the ARM diffs so far, we'll probably need an "ARM branch" as well.) I've played around a bit with creating minimal root filesystems (in the 4-8 MiB range, for use as the flash image in your wireless access point / VoIP gateway / ADSL router.) Manually creating a 8 MiB minimal ARM filesystem based on the ARM RPMS that we carry actually isn't all that hard. Doing it in an automated and repeatable way is somewhat harder. Most of the work to be done in this area is in the tools, and should probably tie in closely with revisor, pilgrim, and such.
