Re: Only m68k and i386 in hamm?
Hamish Moffatt <hamish@debian.org> writes:
> Is there an alpha machine with accounts available so that we i386
> maintainers could try doing alpha compiles ourselves?
No. The machines that most alpha developers have available are either
not well connected, in environments that require more security, or
simply aren't sufficiently powerful to make it reasonable.
In the past I proposed to Bruce that Debian could use some of its
funds to purchase a fast Alpha motherboard and memory to which I could
add plenty of disk space, network connectivity and administrative
services, but got no response.
> Can you give, or give reference to, some information about why alpha
> appears to be more trouble than m68k?
There's more divergence from the i386 environment wise---in all the
packages I've compiled in the last several days, there were at least a
handful of failures because of attempts to make oldlibs packages that
are totally inappropriate for the Alpha since we've been glibc from
the beginning. Those packages *are* needed cor m68k, which has been
around since libc5 days.
Compiler support is less mature---we just now got a version of egcs
that can compile emacs20 reliably. I, personally, have used gcc on
the m68k for nearly a decade, all the way back to 1.X days.
Also, the Alpha is a 64-bit platform, which means we also tend to turn
up issues with source code that makes 32-bit assumptions. And even
Linux/Alpha has undergone one major transition during its availablity
(ECOFF to Elf), that means even emacs-20.2 (only release a few months
ago) needs to be hacked to work correctly, since it's still worrying
about ECOFF.
In addition, remember that glibc patches for many packages (especially
net based ones) originated in the Alpha port. We've been using glibc
exclusively for a year, and had to put in a lot of hard work at the
very beginning to deal with a lot of glibc issues that other hamm
developers were free to not deal with.
Finally, realize that packages-wise, we probably rival RedHat's Alpha
port---something on the order of 800+ packages are available on the
Alpha. However, that's *half* of the number available in Debian/i386.
Many of the ones that haven't been ported are the more obscure ones
that probably don't support Alpha at all. But we try to make it work
anyway.
Mike.
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