Re: Porter roll call for Debian Stretch

On Sat, Oct 1, 2016 at 2:28 AM, Adam Borowski <[email protected]> wrote:
> 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.

Well the bug is really upstream: one cannot assume page size at
compilation time. But that is a different story.

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

Wow ! In fact I just realize my patch was against git/master at the
time, and was never backported. Need to get this fixed ASAP.

>> 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.

Great ! That's all I wanted to check. I was worried we would need
buildd(s) running on ppc64el.