Emdebian ports information
Extending Emdebian Grip to unofficial Debian ports
armhf has moved to official archive support.
The powerpcspe and sh4 unofficial ports have been dropped.
Problems and issues
Unofficial Debian ports have several issues which affect how the ports have to be handled in Emdebian.
No migrations - Unofficial ports are, by definition, incomplete. Package builds are sometimes delayed and migrations within the rest of the Debian will not wait for an unofficial port.
Pool overlaps - Port repositories use separate pool directories for each port but this causes space problems when preparing an Emdebian filter repository which folds the pools into one.
Unreleased packages - Unofficial repositories do not usually carry source packages. Some packages are unreleased which can mean that the sources have been patched.
The net result is that unofficial ports can be hard to use within Emdebian. Packages which are Architecture: all can get pushed ahead of the Debian version by changes in one of the unofficial ports. The lack of a testing suite means that the old version of the package disappears as soon as the next version appears, preventing the creation of a testing suite at a later date. Some packages might not build on all ports, causing missing dependencies.
Overall, there is no chance of a port architecture making it into a stable release, Debian or Emdebian, until officially adopted by Debian and included into the regular buildd/migration infrastructure.
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