Hi Niels,
On Tue, Feb 18, 2020 at 09:45:01PM +0100, Niels Möller wrote:
That's exactly the rabbithole I went down and got lost in the last time: armeb is so niche that I'm not aware of any ready-to-install mainstream distribution for it. I am running Gentoo but that's not easy to maintain in a CI setting. I got a Debian-based qemu-user-binfmt_misc-based image working but that was very brittle as well because in the end it also needed to bootstrap the necessary components from source.
I think there's been some effort to make debian easier to bootstrap for new architectures, but I don't know current state. Gnu guix people are also taking bootstrap very seriously.
I had been working with rebootstrap. But that's not really meant to be able to reliably bootstrap from source at any given point in time but instead to show up bootstrapping problems as a CI measure for the Debian distribution iteself. That means that it breaks on an almost daily basis and an armeb image built with it will need considerable attention to build again after a couple of weeks or months.
So as it stands I cannot offer any improved CI for armeb that's maintainable with reasonable effort.
Then you (or other volunteers with interest in armeb) needs to do manual tests of Nettle from time to time, to keep it in working shape.
I will again look into some sort of CI for armeb.