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Re: ongoing build problems with fityk on arm



On Thu, 28 Sep 2006, Wookey wrote:

On 06-09-17 10:52 -0500, Carlo Segre wrote:

The question is this.  Is fityk really a package that is useful for the
arm architecture?  Only those who use arm can tell me this.  If it isn't
maybe I should exclude arm from the architecture list or the package can
be marked "not-for-us".  I don't even what to try porting it myself using
leisner as that machine has only 64M or RAM and I am sure that it will be
painful if even possible.

A quick read of the decription suggests that a vanishingly small part
of the populace would want to run this package on arm. I can think of
any sensible reason to want to do diffraction pattern analysis on an
arm box, although in theory someone might need some nonlinear
curve-fitting software.

If it uses a lot of floating point (which seems likely) then it really
would be bonkers to run it on arm. I'd be perfectly happy to have it
marked 'not-for-us'.

There is a whole class of software for doing various sorts of
numerical analysis that are not really appropriate for arm, but 'there
isn't any point' has not to date been considered a justification for
not including something in an architecture.

There would be some benefit from a discussion about defining a set of 'no
point on low-powered architectures' packages.

I would welcome such a discussion, as would a couple of other DDs I have been in contact with. My position is that we could designate packages was suitable for different classes of boxen: workstation, server, etc ( I would have to think hard of other categories) and use that as a guideline for applying the not-for-us tag. i am sure that there are other ways to lay out such categories.

Carlo

--
Carlo U. Segre -- Professor of Physics
Associate Dean for Special Projects, Graduate College
Illinois Institute of Technology
Voice: 312.567.3498            Fax: 312.567.3494
segre@iit.edu    http://www.iit.edu/~segre    segre@debian.org



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