Re: Porter roll call for Debian Stretch

Ben Hutchings <[email protected]> Sat, 01 Oct 2016 13:17:54 +0100

Newsgroups	gmane.linux.debian.ports.mips
Message-ID	<1475323579.2632.52.camel__43858.5198521197$1475324346$gmane$org@decadent.org.uk>

On Fri, 2016-09-30 at 22:34 +0200, John Paul Adrian Glaubitz wrote:
> On 09/30/2016 09:04 PM, Niels Thykier wrote:
> > 
> > As for "porter qualification"
> > =============================
> > 
> > We got burned during the Jessie release, where a person answered the
> > roll call for sparc and we kept sparc as a release architecture for
> > Jessie.  However, we ended up with a completely broken and unbootable
> > sparc kernel.
> 
> To be fair, this happened because the upstream kernel development for
> SPARC came to an almost complete stop. There was basically only David
> Miller working on the port which turned out not to be enough.
> 
> 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.

> PowerPC32 is also still quite popular which is why it still sees
> quite some testing in the wild. There are still new PowerPC32 designs
> based on embedded CPUs (FreeScale and the like).

Which are very different from the Power Macs and similar platforms that
most Debian powerpc users care about.

> 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.

Ben.

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

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