iverilog and more

[Larry Doolittle]

Adrian -

I don't think we've met, although I've seen your name many times
on Debian changelogs.  Thanks for all your efforts!

Our team at LBNL uses Debian for some pretty intense FPGA builds and
continuous integration processes, unfortunately using non-free
Xilinx Vivado for the final synthesis&place&route steps.  We do also
use iverilog, yosys, and verilator.

I read in bug #995040 that you uploaded a new iverilog to fix a FTBFS.
Somehow it hasn't shown up?  I only started down this rabbit hole because
I was investigating yosys versions.  I saw that "yosys is marked for
auto-removal from testing" and that alarmed me.

Assuming iverilog gets back to normal, do you have any idea what the
next version of yosys in Debian will be?  Right now we script-build
a version for ourselves from git (commit 40e35993).

We're (finally) starting our transition from Buster to Bullseye.
We are able to _stop_ building verilator, and cross-riscv versions
of binutils, gcc, and newlib.  Unfortunately the 0.9 version of
yosys is still too old for our needs.  It would be nice if Bookworm,
at least, would fix that.

I and others in my group have lots of experience building our tools.
Yosys, in particular, is something of a pain, given its automated tie-in
to a forked copy of abc.  I see the Debian version depends on berkeley-abc.
That's a good sign!

If you can think of any way I can help, please let me know.

  - Larry