Bug#365203: rootskel: Please support the ppc64 architecture

[Andreas Jochens <aj@andaco.de>]

On 06-Apr-29 20:51, Frans Pop wrote:
> tags 365203 - pending
> tags 365203 + wontfix
> tags 365345 + wontfix
> tags 339716 + wontfix
> tags 354947 + wontfix
> thanks
> 
> I'm very sorry, but after discussing this during the d-i development 
> meeting and consulting with Release Management, we feel that the ppc64 
> port ever reaching the archives is currently too uncertain to add support 
> for it in D-I packages.
> 
> Please try to get consensus on the future of the port first.

Hello Frans,

thank you for looking at the ppc64 patches and for discussing ppc64 
on the d-i meeting.

I know that there is no consensus about the future of the ppc64 port.

There have been some discussions that the native ppc64 port might be 
useful to provide multiarch support for powerpc/ppc64 in the same way
as for i386/amd64. The ppc64 port is currently the only way to get
a reasonably complete set of 64-bit libraries for ppc64 machines.
But again, there is no consensus about this and there is certainly
no plan to add the ppc64 port to the official archive in the
near future.

Despite of this, I would like to ask the d-i team and all 
other developers to help the ppc64 port by continuing to apply
simple ppc64 patches, which in most cases just add 'ppc64' to the 
architecture line in debian/control and similar places.

Even if the ppc64 port will never be part of an official release,
this should not do any harm. 

Most packages in the archive have already added ppc64 support 
(most notably gcc, glibc and dpkg). The ppc64 archive has about 98% 
of the source packages from the unstable distribution compiled.
Even some d-i packages (netcfg and yaboot-installer) added explicit
ppc64 support some time ago.

Please do not tag wishlist requests for the addition of 'ppc64' 
to the architecture line in debian/control as 'wontfix'.

Regards
Andreas Jochens