Re: IA-64 GCC deprecation?

On 6/16/19 01:14, Jim Wilson wrote:
> On Sat, Jun 15, 2019 at 2:22 AM Frank Scheiner <[email protected]> wrote:
>> Because as long as there's software for a specific hardware, that
>> hardware **is** useful IMHO. Devaluation of hardware in my eyes does not
>> come through so-called product obsolescence - hardware never has any
>> practical value without software - but by "trashing" key software which
>> originally was created with a lot of effort.
>
> There is no proposal to "trash" any gcc release that contains IA-64
> support.  There is only a proposal to drop it from future releases.

Don't worry, that was not meant as criticism of you or the gcc
maintainers - otherwise I wouldn't have expressed my thanks for your
work in the same email, wouldn't I? :-)

I just felt the need to express a different opinion on your earlier
"[...] an EOL processor doesn't have much value.".

> It is important to keep in mind that software does not magically keep
> working after being written.

It also doesn't magically stop working, there's always a reason behind
when it stops working. I.e. I can think of hardware defects, environment
changes or changes to its dependencies or even changes to the compiler.
So my general assumption is that a lot of issues for software -
especially on non-mainstream architectures - are artificially created
nowadays.

>  Someone has to maintain it. That takes
> time and energy.  It isn't fair to force that burden onto the GCC
> global maintainers when there is no one that cares enough about IA-64
> to maintain it themselves.  Maintenance is a significant long term
> cost, and GCC does not have infinite time and people to do this work.

Please understand that I'm totally with you here.

> We have to focus most our time and energy on the targets that have the
> most users.

How do you measure that - I mean, that ia64 doesn't have that many users
is out of the question - but still, how do you determine that?

> [...]
> Another issue here, if gcc maintainers can't get access to IA-64
> hardware or simulators, how are they supposed to maintain the IA-64
> gcc port?  Most of the lesser gcc targets have freely available
> simulators that make it easy for anyone to test gcc without access to
> hardware.  That is a serious problem for IA-64.  QEMU dropped the
> IA-64 support Nov 2017.  I don't think that ski is maintained anymore
> either.  IA-64 hardware is expensive, and soon won't be manufactured
> anymore.  This is going to make continued maintenance even harder.

Doesn't e.g. Debian have ia64 development machines available? Could
using these be an option for gcc maintainers perhaps?

Apart from that: ski was still good enough for debugging an issue on
ia64 in 2018 (see [1]).

Cheers,
Frank

[1]:
http://trofi.github.io/posts/210-ptrace-and-accidental-boot-fix-on-ia64.html