Re: [Stretch] Status for architecture qualification

[John Paul Adrian Glaubitz]

On 06/18/2016 06:25 PM, William ML Leslie wrote:
> In case it isn't clear, the number of users of the architecture is not part 
> of the qualification, it is the amount of maintenance pressure involved. 
> Package
> maintainers have to put more effort into ensuring builds succeed for release 
> architectures, which detracts from other work that needs to be done. Not 
> being a
> release architecture is perfectly fine.

I maintain multiple architectures in Debian Ports, including m68k, powerpcspe, 
sh4, sparc64 and x32 and actually, it's not so much of a burden to maintain an
architecture in Debian. Most of the packages don't need special attention and 
if they do, it's usually just poorly written code like people doing weird 
pointer
arithmetics which provoke unaligned access or abuse C/C++ in other ways.

If upstream developers in these cases cared more about code quality and 
adhering to the C/C++ standards, we would hardly ever have issues with any 
ports. Heck,
even on m68k, most packages still build fine and they actually work. As long as 
an architecture is maintained upstream both in the kernel and the toolchain,
there is absolutely no reason to not keep it in Debian unless there is no 
hardware available that can be used for buildds and porterboxes. Ports like
Debian/GNU Hurd or Debian/kFreeBSD are a different story though as they need 
way more work to be able to make all sorts of packages work there.

In the case of PowerPC, both the kernel and the toolchain are very well 
maintained, many packages like GHC have native support for the architecture and 
even
rather problematic packages like Firefox/Thunderbird are supported. Plus, 
PowerPC packages can be built on the POWER8 virtual machines that IBM provides
for Debian Developers in the cloud for free. We have one such machine set up 
for ppc64, for example.

In any case, if PowerPC should ever be dropped as a release architecture, I 
will be more than happy to adopt it in Debian Ports.

PS: If you see your package failing to build on any of the ports architectures 
and you want to fix it and need help, just let me know :).

Adrian

-- 
 .''`.  John Paul Adrian Glaubitz
: :' :  Debian Developer - glaub...@debian.org
`. `'   Freie Universitaet Berlin - glaub...@physik.fu-berlin.de
  `-GPG: 62FF 8A75 84E0 2956 9546  0006 7426 3B37 F5B5 F913

Re: [Stretch] Status for architecture qualification

[William ML Leslie]

In case it isn't clear, the number of users of the architecture is not part
of the qualification, it is the amount of maintenance pressure involved.
Package maintainers have to put more effort into ensuring builds succeed
for release architectures, which detracts from other work that needs to be
done. Not being a release architecture is perfectly fine.

And just to bring the topic full circle now, ppc is a release architecture,
nobody is suggesting its removal afaict.
On 18/06/2016 2:54 am, "Brock Wittrock"  wrote:

I run all sorts of PowerPC machines with various versions of Debian and I
don't see that coming to end anytime soon.  These are excellent and
reliable machines.  Biggest issues/hurdles are just graphics at the moment
for both ATI/AMD and Nvidia cards, but even if that is never resolved/fixed
or performance dwindles to nothing, I will continue to use these machines
in text/console only mode if I have to.  Please do not drop this
architecture!


Brock

On Fri, Jun 17, 2016 at 3:24 AM, Riccardo Mottola <
riccardo.mott...@libero.it> wrote:

> Hi,
>
> Dan DeVoto wrote:
>
>> In addition to the debian powerpc mailing list, powerpc users are active
>> on the Ubuntu forums.  I'm running Debian Sid on a Powerbook and everything
>> works except 3D acceleration.  I don't see a need to drop it.
>>
>
> I hope that my iBook G3 will serve me for years to come! Low power
> consumption fanless with a SSD disk make superquiet and quite nice!
>
> Riccardo
>
>