Re: GCC 4.1 now the default GCC version for etch

[Philip Brown <pbrown@debian.org>]

On Fri, Jun 16, 2006 at 11:15:32PM +0200, Falk Hueffner wrote:
> Henning Makholm wrote:
> 
> > Another related bug type that I found lurking in my packages when I
> > investigated the warnings in this list, is trying to format a size_t
> > value with a %u or %d format string, which will break if size_t is 64
> > bits (unless the actual number is small and it is the last argument
> > and the endianness of the architecture happens to match its stack
> > growth direction).
> 
> Since any sane ABI pads arguments to word size, this is only a problem
> on big endian 64-bit architectures (that is, no current release
> architecture).
> 

odd..

there appears to currently be a sparc release of debian,

http://www.debian.org/ports/sparc/

and it appears to claim to support some kind of limited 64bit support.

There are some unstated things from the page that I would like to bring to
the table as relevant:

1. since it is sparc, I would presume debian/sparc is "big endian"
2. since the amd64 arch now has 64bit applications (?) I would guess that
   at some point, the debian sparc folks may follow suit.


So to deliberately ignore an issue, becuase 
"we dont support big-endian 64bit *right now*", would seem to be rather
short sighted to me.