Re: Q to all candidates: should we have more ports?
Hi Wouter
On 2019/04/01 13:55, Wouter Verhelst wrote:
> One thing that Debian has historically been good at, is to produce ports
> for various architectures. However, we're not the most widely ported;
> Gentoo, for instance, has been ported to Interix and macOS[1]. NetBSD
> has a few ports that we do not have, and its pkgsrc is available for a
> large amount of other operating systems beyond NetBSD itself, including
> macOS, HPUX, IRIX, AIX, QNX, and Solaris[2].
>
> Should we try to catch up with these other systems in terms of ports?
> Specifically today, should we try to make Debian usable on any of the
> operating system kernels that I quoted above?
Having Debian run well on macOS would certainly be very useful for many
macOS users, and might help get some of the way to get Debian running
with a Darwin kernel, so I would see that as a reasonably positive
contribution to the Debian eco-system.
Last year Debian became available on the Windows app store. My
Windows-using friends love it, for casual use it's often better than
virtualising or dual-booting.
(https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/p/debian/9msvkqc78pk6)
QNX might be useful for people who need a real-time operating system. It
seems that we don't have a kernel yet that deals as well with real-time
needs in Debian.
As for HPUX, IRIX, AIX, Solaris... meh. There might be some interesting
aspects there but I don't think there's anything there that helps
driving our mission forward or that will help Debian adoption or make
Debian better or more accessible to our universal user base (mhuhahaha
see what I did there).
In terms of our official ports, I do hope that riscv64 becomes a first
class citizen in Debian. It seems to have the potential to become ideal
hardware to run a free software operating system on, and I think there's
some scope for the projects to work together, and as I've mentioned in
my platform, I would try to use my DPL powers to negotiate free hardware
and good deals on RISC-V (and other free hardware platforms) machines.
I also see lots of build failures for IA64, and that it's listed as
discontinued on https://www.debian.org/ports/ - so I can't help but
wonder what the point is of keeping that around. I've asked before on
who uses that and imaged that someone would say "Oh we use a 100 of them
at our university", but it's usually more along the lines of "I have one
of them in my basement". I wonder what would happen if we sent those
people some nice RISC-V hardware to play with instead :)
-Jonathan
--
⢀⣴⠾⠻⢶⣦⠀ Jonathan Carter (highvoltage) <jcc>
⣾⠁⢠⠒⠀⣿⡁ Debian Developer - https://wiki.debian.org/highvoltage
⢿⡄⠘⠷⠚⠋ https://debian.org | https://jonathancarter.org
⠈⠳⣄⠀⠀⠀⠀ I'm very happy! I stole some schmuck's anti-depressants!
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