[Freemint-list] FreeMiNT for 21st century

[Mark Duckworth]

Long ago I created a new sparemint site in PHP.  This site had a couple
main features:

Sparemint was several repos, coldfire, 68020-60 and 68000 separated.
There was an automated build system that interfaced with the site.  An
instance ran on each hardware type.  Rpm doesn't deal with cross builds
well.
When a new package was submitted the autobuild system would
automatically build it for each architecture and show the results on the
website.  After the package built successfully on all arches it would be
approved once 2 other users indicated that the package worked fine for them.

This all basically worked but it was fragile.  The idea is good though
but it is going to require:

1: Finish packaging/porting every single package or updated version of
every package as needed to build on gcc 4.4/4.6/etc.  Sparemint needs to
be brought up to date.  Many of the packages were built with gcc 2.95.3
and in an autobuild situation with 4.x would fail to build.
2: Resolve the build time dependencies of each rpm and fix those
dependencies within the spec files.  The system should be able to
resolve deps on its own such that if I upload a new libncurses for
instnace, all statically linked ncurses packages are automatically
rebuilt against the new library.
3: Improve the frontend site.  It was done in php and it worked but...
so ugly.  My first inclination would be do an asp.net mvc c# site.  I
could knock out a pretty comprehensive site and management system in a
matter of hours.  If we were MS adverse a wordpress site with custom
plugins would probably be the most ideal solution.  I like using MVC/Web
api though because it runs on linux, interacts with just about anything,
has fancy orm systems and linq that allows you to accomplish great
things with very few lines of code, etc.

This whole project was close.  I got a bit discouraged when Frank
decided it was too complicated and not good.  I also ran out of time, my
firebee is broken, etc etc.  But as it stands now I have a good 680x0
system and a good coldfire system.  Also have server space.

There was also a GEM system updater/package installer.  Everything
though needs improvement IMHO.

For me if people want this, are going to use it and are either going to
split or at least not completely duplicate effort I'll get this all back
up and running.  The idea was to replace the sparemint website and
backend infrastructure.  I've been itching to work on it all so this is
timely.

Thanks,
Mark


On 01/19/2017 05:22 PM, Miro Kropáček wrote:
> 
> On 20 January 2017 at 04:41, Rob M <rmahlert at gmail.com
> <mailto:rmahlert at gmail.com>> wrote:
> 
>     I've always hoped we could have a more modern system with auto builds. 
> 
> 
> Actually, this is perhaps one sane area where a custom server could help
> -- see also https://github.com/freemint/freemint/issues/1. I don't have
> any prior experience with github (etc) deployment, I even don't know
> what is the right path to take: it seems one can use a 3rd deployment
> plugin directly on github as well as on Travis CI (after a successful
> build).
> 
> Maybe AWS/Google Could/etc offer similar conditions for open source
> (i.e. you can deploy your stuff for free), maybe not. So if anyone wants
> to help out, this is the most interesting topic right now, how to
> compile & publish our binaries, after each commit.
> 
> 
> -- 
> MiKRO / Mystic Bytes
> http://mikro.atari.org
> 
> 
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