Joseph Kowalski wrote:
> Sorry, I want a fast-track.
What are the architectural (as opposed to C-Team, Design or RE) issues?
>
> 1) I believe this is an incomplete project.
This sounds to me like "go boil the ocean" scope creep.
Roland has identified several utilities that would benefit from
being 64 bit on 64 bit OSs, and is willing to do the work to
"convert" them.
The architecture to "convert" utilities already exists, and is
applicable to anyone else who wants to do the work. And, while it
may be a C-Team issue whether this work is done via isaexec()or via
a makefile change, there is already a mix on SPARC in /usr/bin:
fumount: ELF 64-bit MSB executable SPARCV9 ...
nsrib: ELF 64-bit MSB executable SPARCV9 ...
nsriba: ELF 64-bit MSB executable SPARCV9 ...
If Roland was doing something that created/changed the architecture
such that other things couldn't be converted, then I'd agree with
you, but to say that he must invest additional/unbounded time to
investigate "converting" all the other utilities shows a fundamental
misunderstanding of how a volunteer open source community works.
> 2) We have a 32-bit user land (only) because 32-bit utilities on SPARC
> weren't any faster than 64-bits (so why support both?).
In this case, the 32 bit versions have capacity limits that are
affecting Roland and he wishes to remove those limits. This
is not at all a performance issue, but a make it work better one.
-John
