SGI: Development

Seeing how maintenance of free software is done on IRIX/nekoware made me wonder why more people aren't using Gentoo/Prefix?

Stuart Shelton did a lot of work before losing a hard disk. The Gentoo bugzilla still holds most of his work: https://bugs.gentoo.org/buglist.cgi?lis ... ordssubstr

Call me biased, but this seems much easier and maintainable than different people uploading things they compiled ad-hoc. I think there have been problems with that approach in the past too.

I don't have any IRIX machines (only one O2 left in my possession) but I am a Gentoo/MIPS developer, so I'd be interested in helping.

Gentoo Prefix: http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/gentoo-alt/prefix/

Call me biased, but I associate gentoo with spending a long time installing, chrooting, and building trying to get to the same state that a single CD for other distributions would get you to in one click.

I also associate gentoo with people downloading the source and building themselves rather than a binary distribution, and seeing as few have access to MIPSpro I see that as a problem.

I like the centralised development approach when the repository disk crashes. Good plan.

I'm happy with the nekoware approach, people do what they want when they can with what they can, when they can.

Given the low speed of IRIX systems, binary packages are a good idea. Gentoo supports binary packages, so this would be quite easily doable.

The disk crash I mentioned was Stuart's IRIX disk. It wasn't related to Gentoo.

But don't let that get in the way of your associations.

The only problems have been with a couple people who did a crappy job of creating tardists. Since it's quite possible to have bad quality control with any system - and Linux leads the pack in crappy q/c - I fail to see where introducing yet another linux boondoggle to Irix would lead to any improvements.

I'm using it on HP-UX: https://bitbucket.org/dukzcry/gentoo-pr ... pa-overlay . It's a pain in ass to bootstrap, but once done, it's fairly usable.