Re: Bug#198158: architecture i386 isn't i386 anymore
Colin Watson dijo [Wed, Jun 25, 2003 at 11:05:56AM +0100]:
> > We should foist the job of supporting i386 onto some specialized Debian
> > port for it.
>
> The problem is that we really don't have sensible support for
> subarchitectures at all. This makes the job of creating such a
> specialized port much greater than just "I have some hardware and need
> to make a small tweak to support it"; you need to patch dpkg and make
> substantial changes in the archive organization to share packages
> between architectures, or else take a multi-gigabyte hit in disk space
> and a huge amount of pointless effort rebuilding packages for some new
> 'i386only' architecture. 386 people would be quite entitled to look at
> all this mess and say "well, why don't you just leave everything as it
> is and let us make this small kernel change, until we can standardize on
> gcc-3.3 with a fixed ABI"?
And not only 80386 needs this - There is the Sparc64 port which would
also benefit from this (http://www.debian.org/ports/sparc/#64bit). If we
had support for subarchtectures, not only would the ix86 mess be able to
be split in many flavors (i.e. strict 386, 486 and up, 686, or whatever
you fancy). And I am sure this can somehow help maintain the non-Linux
ports - NetBSD gives us the potential to bring Debian to _many_ new
platforms.
--
Gunnar Wolf - gwolf@gwolf.cx - (+52-55)5630-9700 ext. 1366
PGP key 1024D/8BB527AF 2001-10-23
Fingerprint: 0C79 D2D1 2C4E 9CE4 5973 F800 D80E F35A 8BB5 27AF
Reply to: