Re: Status of Sarge Release Issues (Updated for May)
>1 i386 support? (The large thread starting with
>http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2003/debian-devel-200304/msg01895.html
>talks about this). Do we have to wait for upstream to fix this? If so that
>might mean a gcc3.4 transition and well, at least half a year before
>freeze (gcc 3.3 is currently in stage three, gcc3.4 will take at least 6
>months to complete the release schedule that
>http://gcc.gnu.org/develop.html describes).
As has been discussed, this may be impossible to fix and is certainly
extremely difficult.
The fundamental issue affects libstdc++ atomicity. The implementation is
exposed as ABI. Changing this would be a lot of work and might not even make
it into gcc 3.5 (and would be an ABI change anyway).
The implementation used for i486+ is the one which all other Linux vendors
have standardized on, and which was "used" (but didn't work) for 386 in gcc
3.2. There is now (gcc 3.3) a version which works for 386, but it's up to
*50%* slower, which is unacceptable. Someone may come up with a faster one,
but the slowdown is still going to be significant, and will still cause ABI
incompatibility.
Accordingly, currently anything using the new libstdc++ is effectively 486+
only. This can't be changed without breaking compatibility with other
distributions *and* cauing major slowdowns.
An alternate, separate architecture for real i386 would have to accept this
incompatibility and recompile all libraries and programs linked to libstdc++.
ON another topic...
>2 KDE (3.1?)? Is there a status site? 3.1.1 is in unstable.
KDE 3 is held up by Qt 3, mostly...
which means that the priorities for these two aren't consistent. :-) Either
lower KDE3 or raise QT3...
>3 QT transition (Qt2->Qt3)? Mentioned in thread
>http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2003/debian-devel-200303/msg00217.html
I think QT is holding up a lot of other things too.
--Nathanael
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