Re: Let's remove mips, mipsel, s390, ...

[Brian Nelson <pyro@debian.org>]

Jim Gettys <Jim.Gettys@hp.com> writes:

> On Mon, 2005-02-21 at 11:13 -0800, Brian Nelson wrote:
>> On Mon, Feb 21, 2005 at 11:33:35AM +0100, Wouter Verhelst wrote:
>> > On Sun, Feb 20, 2005 at 10:57:47PM +0000, Dirk Eddelbuettel wrote:
>> > > But a total of eleven is insane.
>> > 
>> > It is sometimes hard to get them all to work, yes.
>> > 
>> > It also vastly increases the quality of the Free Software in our
>> > archive, as we discover bugs that appear only on one architecture.
>> 
>> That's an overstatement.  Simply having two architectures (i386 and ppc)
>> would be enough to reveal nearly all portability bugs.
>> 
>
> Actually, my long experience is that it takes more than 2; but at, say,
> 4 systems (both byte orders, both 32 and 64 bits) you get most of them.

Errr, yeah, I was thinking of amd64 as well but forgot to explicitly say
so.

> More important at that point is getting better compiler coverage; gcc
> and friends is *not* the only compiler suite in the world, and different
> compilers uncover a different spectrum of bugs.

Yeah, definitely.  If our goal is making our software as portable and
bug-free as possible, we'd be better off running fewer arches but with a
greater variety of compilers.

Now if there were only any viable free alternatives to GCC...

-- 
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