Re: Porter roll call for Debian Stretch

On Fri, Sep 30, 2016 at 11:01:55PM +0200, Mathieu Malaterre wrote:
> On Fri, Sep 30, 2016 at 10:34 PM, John Paul Adrian Glaubitz
> <[email protected]> wrote:
> [...]
> > On the other hand, some packages dropped support for PowerPC32 like Mono
> > but this isn't a concern for most users, I would say.
> [...]
> 
> However I need to mention that the specific ppc/mono issue is in fact
> pretty interesting. The long thread is on [email protected] but the
> short version is that this issue only happen because we build the
> ppc32 mono version on a ppc64 kernel, I know that since I did debug
> this issue.

Which, if I read the bug correctly, is a yet another case of a bogus
build system looking at characteristics of the machine it's compiled on
rather than baseline of the arch.

And, per your own work, it's +patch +fixed-upstream.

> I have not heard from the ppc64el porters, but I suspect ppc64 will
> not be a release arch. So you need to take into consideration that for
> powerpc to remain a release arch, one need minimal working ppc64 port.
> Could we solve the situation of ppc64 for Stretch, could it be moved
> to official release arch ?

What would you need ppc64 for?  Unlike i386, powerpc includes 64-bit
kernels so users don't need multiarch:

powerpc has:
linux-image-4.7.0-1-powerpc - Linux 4.7 for uniprocessor 32-bit PowerPC (signed)
linux-image-4.7.0-1-powerpc-smp - Linux 4.7 for multiprocessor 32-bit PowerPC (signed)
linux-image-4.7.0-1-powerpc64 - Linux 4.7 for 64-bit PowerPC (signed)
i386 has:
linux-image-4.7.0-1-686-pae-unsigned - Linux 4.7 for modern PCs
linux-image-4.7.0-1-686-unsigned - Linux 4.7 for older PCs
linux-image-4.7.0-1-grsec-686-pae - Linux 4.7 for modern PCs, Grsecurity protection
linux-image-4.7.0-1-686 - Linux 4.7 for older PCs (signed)
linux-image-4.7.0-1-686-pae - Linux 4.7 for modern PCs (signed)

Note the joke: "for modern PCs".  Unless you do embedded it takes some
serious dumpster diving to find a machine not better served by an -amd64
kernel (and thus multiarch).  The i386 architecture is not self-contained,
powerpc is.

Thus, there is no need for ppc64 (userland), as long as powerpc has the
toolchain to build 64-bit kernels.  And that's a primary target for gcc
upstream.