Move Raspberry Pi boards to community?
We already have other SBCs in community:
- the PINE64 RockPro64 and Arrow DragonBoard 410c share SoCs with other devices;
- the ODROID HC2 uses its own kernel package to add some workarounds.
Although the Raspberry Pi doesn't necessarily fit into either of these categories, there are other compelling reasons to include it in community:
- It's widely available (well, if you ignore the current shortages...), which makes it a good starting point for people who want to try out postmarketOS.
- It will make it easier to introduce full community support for Raspberry Pi-based devices, like the CutiePi tablet.
The benefit over having it in Alpine edge is access to supported stable releases.
Since the Raspberry Pi is already well supported in Alpine, a lot of the effort has already been done on their part, and maintaining the pmOS port should be relatively simple.
My only concern with this is whether putting the Pi in community won't promote pmOS as a lazy OS solution for SBCs, skipping the point of pmOS being a "mobile OS"... but this doesn't seem logical to me. As mentioned, we already have multiple SBCs in community; besides, pmOS has been used for non-mobile ARM-based devices like Chromebooks. There's nothing wrong with it being used for that purpose - if anything, having a tried-and-tested base distro for all of those cases benefits both users and developers.
I'm willing to kickstart the moving process for the Raspberry Pi 4 (@drebrez, since you've mentioned you aren't really active in development anymore, is it fine if I do this and take over maintainership?); sadly I don't own the other boards, perhaps someone else would be willing to help?
(There's also the matter of whether the older Pis should get moved as well... imo, at least the Pi 3 and the Pi 4 should be in community, the Pi Zero - perhaps, unsure about the rest.)