Re: Porter roll call for Debian Stretch

Ben Hutchings <[email protected]> Sat, 01 Oct 2016 19:56:18 +0100

Newsgroups	gmane.linux.debian.ports.amd64
Message-ID	<1475348178.2632.73.camel__13472.0047274188$1475348238$gmane$org@decadent.org.uk>

On Sat, 2016-10-01 at 15:48 +0200, John Paul Adrian Glaubitz wrote:
> On 10/01/2016 02:17 PM, Ben Hutchings wrote:
> > 
> > > 
> > > This isn't the case for PowerPC32 where upstream development is still very
> > > active because it's part of the PowerPC kernel which is maintained by
> > > IBM.
> > 
> > This is not at all true.  My experience is that IBM doesn't even build-
> > test 32-bit configurations, as evidenced by several stable updates
> > causing FTBFS in Debian.
> 
> They care enough that they are fixing bugs. Just recently, a bug in the
> PowerPC kernel was fixed that affected 32-bit embedded PowerPCs only.

$ git log --author=ibm --grep='ppc-?32|powerpc-?32|32-bit' -i -E arch/powerpc

finds me fewer than ten commits per year.

> > 
> > > 
> > > As for SPARC, Oracle is actually now heavily investing in Linux SPARC
> > > support, so even SPARC is getting back into shape which is why I hope
> > > we can add sparc64 as an official port soon.
> > [...]
> > 
> > Oracle cares about Solaris on SPARC, not Linux on SPARC.
> 
> Well, then you know more than the people at Oracle that I am talking to.
[... much evidence of Oracle supporting Linux on SPARC ...]

OK, I accept this has changed, but I'm quite surprised - Oracle is
ruthlessly commercial, and I'm mystified as to who they expect to buy
it.

Ben.

-- 
Ben Hutchings
Klipstein's 4th Law of Prototyping and Production:
                                    A fail-safe circuit will destroy
others.

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