Le Thu, Jan 25, 2007 at 03:55:42PM +0100, Andreas Moll a écrit : > The problem is, that my application is based on roughly 500,000 lines > of code, that we developed in the last years. I can not guarantee that > it will work on the other platforms, especially because we are > dependent on external libraries, that may show unsuspected behaviour. > What is even worse: I have no computer available to test our software > for example on a power pc architecture. What happens if my package > fails to build on such a machine and I get a critical "Fails to > build"error?
Hi Andreas, As BALLview is a new package, if it fails to build on one architecture, its propagation to the testing distribution will not be impaired. This lets you one year or two to either fix the problem or drop arch support before inclusion in the next stable release of Debian (as Etch is frozen, BALLview will not be part of it). As Steffen said, most Debian ports are supported by enthousiast developper very loyal to their favorite architecture. They can, and will, help you to fix the bugs. As you are interested in portability, it is very useful for you. We have seen in the recent years major changes in mainstream platforms : the PC world migrates to amd64, and the Mac world migrated to intel processors. What will be the next move ? No one knows. For instance, a company is deveolpping 16-core mips processors. Will there be machines with that kind of processor in structural biology labs in the future ? Who knows, but Debian gives you an opportunity to have your package built and debugged on mips even if you do not think that there can be users on this arch today. I will try to build your package overnight on powerpc, and tell you the result tomorrow (japan time...). I hope that you can enble ppc support in the meantime. PS: Thanks for your post on debian-science. Have a nice day, -- Charles Plessy http://charles.plessy.org Wako, Saitama, Japan -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
