Re: Broken applications: Could we be honest?
On 7/8/06, Art Edwards <edwardsa@afrl.kirtland.af.mil> wrote:
I have been writing to the list about two applications that
are so broken on the AMD64 distribution that they render the
box pretty useless.
Did you send bugreports for those programs?
Btw, what is the appropriate severity level for a package that doesn't
work on a certain architecture at all? Is it release critical?
I'm sure one could say that two measly
applications are no big deal. However, if you do scientific computation
for a living, and two of the primary tools are broken, you now have
a rather clumsy paperweight where a computer should be.
You have the option of running 32-bit debian on the box.
You have the possibility to run a pure64 debian, _and_ create a 32-bit
chroot for applications
that don't yet work on 64bit. It is explained in the debian amd64 howto.
Using this approach you get the advantages of 64bit for applications
that "support" it (i.e. they work on it), and you can use the 32bit
chroot for the rest, there should be no slowdown,
amd64 can run 32bit instruction natively.
Unless such core pieces as the debugging tool (ddd) and the data display tool
(xmgrace) are working,
I am not trying to tell you to use other tools, but here it is what I
use for debugging, and
it works on amd64:
I am using clewn [http://clewn.sourceforge.net/], and I am very happy with it.
It display the source code in gvim, and allows you to issue gdb
commands, either from vim, or from the gdb "console". It has support
for watches, etc. IMHO it is worth checking out.
it is dishonest to pretend that the 64-bit version
is ready for testing.
Did you mean "testing" as in "debian testing distro, aka etch"?
It would be very nice if you, and other distro's, were
to put appropriate caveats on the websites, saying that 64-bit is really not
ready for the prime-time desktop. That way, we could make better purchasing
decisions.
You can still run those apps in 32-bit chroot, so you didn't spend
your money in vain.
Cheers,
Edwin
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