Re: [MiNT] Other Sparemint Decisions

[Paul Wratt <paul.wratt@gmail.com>]

2010/1/10 Vincent Rivière <vincent.riviere@freesbee.fr>:
> Helmut Karlowski wrote:
>>
>> Is there any 'official' site for gcc4 (cross and native) and lib?
>
> My personal interest is to to provide MiNT patches for the latest stable
> versions of the binutils and GCC, as well as Cygwin binaries for these
> tools, and the required libraries to be able to build MiNT software from MS
> Windows.
> My latest patches and Cygwin binaries are always available here:
> http://vincent.riviere.free.fr/soft/m68k-atari-mint/
>
> I would be happy if the SpareMiNT team use these patches for their official
> dev tools. However, I will not provide myself native RPMs for MiNT, as I
> don't need them myself (I have explained several times that I'm only
> interested in cross-compilation).
>
> Be sure I do everything possible to keep the patches compilable on MiNT.
>
> --
> Vincent Rivière
>
It is my hope (and duty?)  to take your patches and documentation,
along with any by other people (there are at least 3 now), and provide
ARAnyM, gcc cross-compilers, and binutils for use with PCLinuxOS, and
hence any other Mandriva based distribution

>From what I percieve from comments on the thread (and others) there is
a multi-lib patch set available somewhere which can help others in
getting cross-compilers and other ports to natively build as well
(correct me if I am wrong)

I hope to use the initiative by Mark of allowing for multiple GCC to
co-exist, and be usable on any target platform, as 2.95.3 is still a
viable option for many older sources to be ported (with only minimal
source changes).

In the 12 months before I came to this mailing list I found about a
1000+ packages that are dated to around the exact time period of the
current SpareMiNT archive, and so 2.95.3 is essential to allow
preliminary inclusion, or at least package creation, some of which are
stable and more fleshed out updates, and hence (because of there age)
more user friendly to older systems (which lack raw resources)

I am of the opinion that not all modern software is usable on a
practical level, not even on the 100Mhz CT's and 200+Mhz ACP, so
having slightly older versions which have less exorbitant requirements
on both library versions, and runtime resources, will be of use

I think that there is a way to get a lot of the more modern software
to be more usable on even an older Atari system, if there some way to
generically patch to sources, based on library and function usage, but
that this would require an effort by more than one person, and that
its target would not nescessarily be restricted to Atari ST compatible
only, but maybe imbedded system, portable devices, etc

I know that there are initiatives like this already going, lite weight
libraries, two of which happens to be a QT and WebKit. There is also a
lite weight GTK2 in the works..

It would seem therefore that over time a custom set of libraries to
allow not only easier porting, but back porting and creation of new
and modern Atari based apps to Linux, Windows and MacOSX, those
libraries being super lite weight, ultra fast, yet modern and flexible

2010 is (hopefully) the year of bloatware blowout, so there should be
lots of incentive from outside the Atari community to assist in this
also, well we can only hope.

Cheers

Paul