On 8/1/12 8:19 PM, Andrew Whitworth wrote:
I've also tried looking for an old PPC mac to purchase for myself, but I've been unable to find one in workable condition for a price I can pay.
Well, perhaps when I buy a new Mac, I can give you mine :-)
[snip]
We can declare Darwin/PPC to be a platform we no longer support. That is my preferred solution for that platform at this point, considering it's age and relatively small (and shrinking) user base.
The significance of Darwin/PPC is not that it is a platform we need to support. Its significance is that it is a platform on which Parrot master has built and tested successfully at least since 2006 and probably since 2001. Today, more than 11 years since we first started building and testing on it, it still has a better test record than, say, Windows.
It continues to build on Parrot master and, as of July 24, the whiteknight/io_cleanup1 branch was PASSing 'make test' here as well. (I am re-running that branch now to double check.)
So the locus of the problem is the threads branch, where the fact that tests *hang* -- which is a different problem from tests *failing* -- has been confirmed by dukeleto. And Darwin/PPC is not the only platform on which the threads branch is FAILing 'make test. That suggests to me that the problem is in the branch, not in the platform.
This further suggests to me that we, as a group, do not understand what is happening in the threads branch or, more fundamentally, what the purpose of the threads branch is and how merging it into master would improve Parrot. Only two contributors have committed to the branch in the past month, and only four contributors in the past two months. (And since I was one of those four when I made changes to pmc2c, that's really only three. ;-) ) Quick! If anyone other than whiteknight can explain the purpose of the threads branch without pausing for more than thirty seconds, raise your hand now. Ah, I thought so.
I don't claim to understand threads in any computer technology. All I know is that (a) whenever the topic of threads comes up, everyone's first reaction is: "Threads are hard"; (b) even in Perl 5, perl with threads is a very different beast from perl without threads. In twelve years of doing Perl 5, I've never had a reason to compile or use a perl with threads. I don't think I'm alone in that. Hence, I suspect that only a literal handful of people in the Parrot world have a good understanding of threads, know what's in the threads branch and can explain why we need that functionality in Parrot.
So the real question is not whether Parrot "supports" Darwin/PPC. The real question is: Do the benefits from merging the threads branch into master outweigh the risks we incur when we don't know why tests are failing on platforms where they have long passed?
Thank you very much. Jim Keenan _______________________________________________ http://lists.parrot.org/mailman/listinfo/parrot-dev
