request: Raspberry Pi OS

[mcandre]

Hi,

I am curious about opportunities for an official Raspberry Pi OS. I think that would help more devs to port their apps to RPi, and ARM platforms in general.

Raspberry Pi OS is said to be quite similar to Debian, with a different set of default apt repositories, and a mere handful of other package names installed by default.

dtcooper/raspberrypi-os-docker#6

Should Raspberry Pi OS tags go in the library/debian image, or a separate image?

[tianon]

Definitely a separate image - Raspberry Pi OS is not created by or part of Debian in any way.

My understanding of Raspberry Pi OS is that for arm64, it's literally just Debian (plus a minor Raspberry Pi package overlay), and for armhf it's literally just Raspbian (perhaps again plus a minor overlay?).

[mcandre]

Discussed some of the details of RPi's relationship with Debian on Libera chat recently. 32 bit ARM diverges more from Debian, but the 64-bit ARM edition is quite similar.

[tianon]

Approaching this from a different direction, what makes a Debian-based arm64 image incompatible with running on Raspberry Pi OS? Why not just use Debian? What does having a specific Raspberry Pi OS based image do for you?

[mcandre]

Fair question.

A more specific image, provides stronger guarantees that packages built with it will, in fact be compatible with that distro. Copying a .DEB to RPi and hoping for the best, may have a fair chance of succeeding. But as a precaution, ideally we have the option of exact match distro packages available.

There are packages in RPi that are not available in the Debian repos.

An image provides fast, convenient answers to a lot of subtle questions about environment similarities and differences.

The differences are greater for 32-bit ARM variants, and I do not possess those details.

[tianon]

For packages, yes, you need a higher level of compatibility. I'm with you there.

Where I'm lost is images/containers where all that matters is kernel compatibility (which is honestly pretty legendary) and architecture compatibility (and the Debian baseline is pretty generous, so this should be fine too). 😅

[mcandre]

I'm less worried about kernel compatibility, as I am migrating my Linux precompiled binaries to fully static musl.

[tianon]

If your binaries are fully static, you could copy them into scratch and have no userspace OS at all 😅