Tools for eCos 2.0

[Jonathan Larmour]

Christopher Faylor wrote:
> 
> Cygwin disallows direct downloads from sources.redhat.com, relying on
> mirrors to handle this.  Without this restriction cygwin would probably
> consume a significant portion of the bandwidth of sources.redhat.com.
 >
 > I don't think there is any reason why eCos should be taking up a
 > disproportionate amount of bandwidth if, as you suspect, it will be
 > popular.  So we may decide to enforce the mirrors-only rule here.

I don't think it should either. It may not even happen! Introducing a 
download bandwidth limit seems like the best compromise as it guarantees 
it won't use a disproportionate amount of bandwidth in case it does.

There will undoubtedly be a rush as a new release comes out, which is 
primarily what we want to mitigate, but that won't be representative for 
policy afterwards. In particular, when the release is announced we can't 
guarantee all the mirrors will have updated (we'll delay the announcement 
a few days but we can't make people wait forever). That doesn't apply so 
much to cygwin as it updates piecemeal - it doesn't _really_ matter if 
people have diff 2.7.2-1 versus 2.7.2-2.

I'd like disallowing downloads entirely to be something we can use later 
if we find the situation to definitely warrant it. If we do it straight 
away, we'll never know whether it was warranted or not. Right now we're 
only concerned about mitigating the effect on sources.redhat.com at the 
time of the announcement.

Incidentally, I found some out of date stuff on 
<http://sources.redhat.com/mirrors.html> :

- ftp.freesoftware.com is no more

- ftp.carfield.com.hk doesn't appear to work, although www.carfield.com.hk 
does.

- You could rename the funet.fi link to use sources.redhat.com instead of 
sourceware.cygnus.com now

- Japan's sysg.kek.jp doesn't appear to work

- Norway's ftp.pvv.ntnu.no is no more

- ftp.sun.ac.za's link should be 
ftp://ftp.sun.ac.za/mirrorsites/sourceware.cygnus.com/pub/

- ftp.sdn.co.za doesn't appear to work, although that really could be just 
temporary

- Taiwan's ftp1.sinica.edu.tw link should be 
ftp://ftp1.sinica.edu.tw/pub3/GNU/CYGNUS/

- sunsite.org.uk no longer mirrors sourceware

- unix.hensa.ac.uk should now instead be: 
ftp://ftp.mirror.ac.uk/sites/sources.redhat.com/pub/ and 
http://www.mirror.ac.uk/sites/sources.redhat.com/pub/

Hope this helps.

> I'm not sure that I understand the argument of users not being "GNU
> enthusiasts".  Since you are targeting a technical audience, I don't see
> why this is an issue.

Our audience is embedded developers. They want to build eCos and we've put 
in a lot of effort to make building eCos as easy as possible. They know 
how to develop embedded applications.

However we don't expect them to have to understand how to deal with 
building toolchains. We already have detailed instructions on building a 
toolchain, but we get frequent messages due to problems with building the 
tools. Helping people build tools isn't meant to be an issue for us or for 
them. Just like you wouldn't expect cygwin users to build their packages 
from scratch and wouldn't want to have to deal with the resulting problems 
if you did. :-)

Also remember this is the _only_ eCos site. Any impediments we throw in 
people's way stops people using eCos *at all*, and instead more likely to 
go with their proprietary closed source alternative.

> I assume that you will be dealing with the GPL issues.  You will be
> providing sources for all of the binaries you produce, right?  Are the
> sources included in your disk space estimate?

Ah yes, I didn't include those as to be honest I don't expect many people 
to download them with the prebuilts there. It's just one set of sources 
for the whole lot. The total comes out as 38Mb (gcc-core, gcc-g++, 
insight, binutils), but since most of these are just official releases we 
_could_ just distribute the small number of patches against them. But 
naturally we'd prefer to distribute the true sources we used.

> On a more personal note, if you are going to be providing binaries that
> duplicate anything that is already available in a cygwin release then I
> would strongly object to that.

Only if you distribute arm-elf-gcc and we didn't know it :-). These are 
just builds of gcc, insight and binutils for cross targets.

> Finally, if you are using this in any way as a distribution method for a
> commercial venture then I think it is not appropriate for
> sources.redhat.com.

Nope. It's just free software and a free public release. Yes my employer 
is contributing most of the effort for this next release of eCos, but in 
exactly the same way as Red Hat, Code Sourcery or many other companies do 
towards other free projects.

Ta,

Jifl
-- 
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--[  can rejoice because thorns have roses." -Lincoln   ]-- Opinions==mine