[Soc-coordination] Final report - Debian MIPS N32/N64 Port

[Eleanor Chen]

Hi,

This is the fourteenth report of Debian MIPS N32/N64 Port project,
which is the final one. I would like to thank everyone that helped on
making this project possible, the main project goal is accomplished.

The original goal is to work out four build-essential chroot (mips64,
mips64el, mipsn32, and mipsn32el) and do archive rebuild for at least
mips64 and mips64el, but later we amended it to making an mips64el
port first. We've tried to build mips64 and N32 toolchains resolving
all the problems, but we have so limited building resource to do
rebuilds that even mips64el is going forward slowly using the two
Loongson 3A notebooks provided by Lemote, and big endian hardware set
up by Cavium is ready a bit late for this SoC project.

We've created a set of cross toolchain on amd64 based on Ubuntu's
armhf cross toolchain with changes that deal with MIPS's tri-arch
configuration (o32, n32, and n64). With the help of multi-arch and the
cross toolchain, we are able to cross build a native chroot with
build-essential available, and started the archive rebuild process
with the help from my mentors.

In the past month, we've tried to start the rebuild several times
though we met several set up problems so the current running rebuild
was started for about three weeks. So far we've got ~5000 successful
builds, tracking unstable. There are several critical points and
circular dependencies (like Perl, Python, and crypto stuff, etc) we've
resolved during the past two months so the way of this rebuild is
quite clear till now. But the rebuild is slowing down because there
are more issues to be resolved and larger packages is flowing into the
queue as their build dependencies is being satisfied.

Thanks again for the opportunity to participate GSoC and try out
something that is completely new!

Thank you,
Eleanor Chen