Re: Suggestion: Skip Slink!
On Tue, Jan 05, 1999 at 03:54:24PM -0600, John Goerzen wrote:
> On Tue, Jan 05, 1999 at 03:41:16PM -0500, Avery Pennarun wrote:
>
> > What I should have said was: it's nice to have a sparc port, but sparc
> > isn't important enough to hold up the i386 release and especially not
> > important
>
> "Not important" is all too often applied to the non-i386 releases. I find
> it apalling. There should be no reason to consider one Debian architecture
> superior to another, or more or less worthy of being included with the
> release CDs, etc. (Excepting ports that are not yet complete, of course.)
Whoah, hey, cool off. I'm not saying all non-i386 arches are unimportant,
I'm saying that no one arch is important enough to hold up all the others.
> If, for instance, there's a critical bug in some vital package (say, X) that
> only manifests itself on big-endian machines, the release should and would
> be held up to fix it. I think you may feel differently if you ponder what
> would happen if that logic were applied to the i386 version. Everyone else
> releases, but no i386 release. Could be interesting, don't you think?
In that case, the i386 version is broken, so don't release it. The others
are not, so WHY NOT release them? I wouldn't feel at all surprised or upset
if that were to happen. (Well, perhaps a bit upset, but purely because the
package was broken on my arch and I would want it fixed.)
> As somebody that has run Debian on at least two non-i386 platforms, I feel
> justly offended by your attitude and the attitue of those like you that
> consider non-i386 Debian distributions second-class citizens somehow. There
> is no logical reason for this distinction. The Linux kernel supports my
> Alpha in 64-bit mode as well as, if not better than, your i386 in 32-bit
> mode. If you are talking about technical merit, I'm sure most will tell you
> that i386 is at or near the bottom of the heap, not the top. So please,
> don't get this "high and mighty i386" attitude.
Hi, I use Debian on my alpha and previously used it on a sparc at work. I'm
subscribed to both the debian-sparc and debian-alpha lists. I feel your
pain, honest.
But it worries me when the groups get overzealous about their "rights" as a
port. Why on earth would you want to hold up slink/i386 just because
slink/sparc is broken? They're two totally different dists. And it's just
as easy (easier?) to catch up with the packages in a released dist as in a
frozen one.
Have fun,
Avery
Reply to: