Heya,

you may want to get in touch with https://salsa.debian.org/electronics-team.

I had a look and like the device.  Conceptionally, it would be very interesting to learn if you can build the firmware for the Spartan-3
also with Debian. It should be possible with Yosys. I do not mean that
you need to Open Source your firmware, but just to know that others
could come up with their own and use that - would be nice, maybe you
could open source some parts of that so that the driver could be reused
- you get the idea.

Cheers,
Steffen

Am 01.06.2021 um 13:19 schrieb Tobias Frost:

On Tue, Jun 01, 2021 at 01:05:49PM +0200, Gürkan Myczko wrote:

Hi Tobias,

this seems to be a quite specific software for some quite specific
evaluation
board…

Indeed the software is only useful with this hardware:
https://www.radec.ch/shop

It seems a bit out-of-scope for Debian to carry such specialized
software?

I would disagree, if people can buy the device, and just install the
software with apt, it's a win. I have several users with several computers >> and
such boards. They are glad to use apt.

I might be really wrong, so maybe elaborate a bit why you think this
software
should be in Debian?

Debian is the universal OS? But if you think low number of users of hardware >> specific software should rule out such software, maybe
https://packages.debian.org/callisto
should be removed as well?

Well, this is not about callisto. So no need to pull this strawman.

In Debian we do not (and cannot) package every piece of software, this is not the defintiion of "universal operating system". It should have some relevance though, as every package has some cost to the project (not monetary, but e.g people need to look at thpower)

If you say, it has relevance, then this is sufficient for me.

The question if something is relevant is not unusual in Debian to ask.

--
tobi

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On Tue, Jun 1, 2021 at 11:46 AM Steffen Möller wrote:

I had a look and like the device. Conceptionally, it would be very interesting to learn if you can build the firmware for the Spartan-3
also with Debian. It should be possible with Yosys. I do not mean that
you need to Open Source your firmware, but just to know that others
could come up with their own and use that - would be nice, maybe you
could open source some parts of that so that the driver could be reused
- you get the idea.

The tarball already includes the firmware source in *.vhd and other
files, presumably under the same license as the rest of the package,
but I cannot find any indication in the tarball that this package is
under the GPL though (except for the embedded code copy of the MIDAS
XML Library), but the website does say GPLv3.

Looks like Yosys doesn't yet fully support Spartan-3:

https://github.com/YosysHQ/yosys/issues/448

SymbiFlow are working on Xilinx Artix 7-Series FPGAs, perhaps they
could eventually support Xilinx Spartan-3 too.

https://symbiflow.github.io/

--
bye,
pabs

https://wiki.debian.org/PaulWise

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