Re: porting Mozart to alpha, arm, hppa, mipsel, s390

[Randolph Chung <tausq@debian.org>]

> A little less ignorance and little more tolerance might prove more
> helpful to us all.

indeed....

> There is very little that depends on platform recognition. (1) a

so, by your own admission, there's no good reason to assume things do
not work. of the thousands of packages that we've built on hppa, very
few of them have been previously built on this platform. do we then
assume that they all do not work?

please understand where we are coming from, as porters for Debian we 
try to get all the software available in the Debian archive to be
available for all the platforms that we support (13 at last count, if i
remember correctly). sadly, most of the "porting" issues we face are not
really because of the platform itself, but because package maintainers
either do not follow good programming practices for portability (e.g.
assume x86 or alpha -> little endian), or because either the upstream
authors or the Debian maintainers explicitly make a package not build on
an architecture (but having debian control files that limit architecture
settings, or a configure script that dies because it doesn't recognize
the platform). These things do nothing to improve the robustness,
supportability and of course portability of the software. If we are
going to try to port your software, we would rather be spending time
tracking down real bugs, rather than trying to figure out what you've
put into place to explicitly prevent a package to build. there are much
fewer "porters" then there are application developers.....

Now, on to technical issues...
The build log for mozart for hppa: 
(http://buildd.debian.org/fetch.php?&pkg=mozart&ver=1.2.3.20011204-3&arch=hppa&stamp=1013366157&file=log&as=raw) 

1. You need to update your config.{guess,sub} files. You can find the
upstream versions at http://subversions.gnu.org/cgi-bin/viewcvs/config/config/

2. The build log shows that you are using ld to link. This is not 
portable, you should use gcc to link your executables and libraries
instead.

randolph


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