Frank Küster wrote:
For the porters to a specific architecture, this means they have an easy way to get nearer to the 98% and the N<=2 criteria: Just convince the maintainers of heavy-loaded desktop stuff, of big self-bootstrapping numbercrunching applications, and whatever, to take your architecture out of the Architecture field.
Err, it's even easier than that: they can mark the package as "not-for-us", and just not try to build it even if it's arch:any.
And this is not "cheating". If KDE is of no use on m68k or for most mips applications; or if 98% of sparc users[1] don't need a desktop, then it's not unjust if those are simply excluded. Remember, in the old days before Vancouver ;-) it was mainly compiled for the benefit of the _other_ arches.
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And for the 2% of sparc users that do use KDE, it would probably be okayto have a separate archive for such stuff.
If the package is going to be built, build it, upload it, and keep it maintained. If you're already willing to just send people off to random other sources, then you're not thinking "debian stable level quality" anyway, and the non-release-track / snapshotting approach is likely fine anyway.
Cheers, aj