SUMMARY: pentium optimized debian discussion

[Joey Hess <joey@kitenet.net>]

It's been a long thread. Here's what've come up so far:

Speed increases of pentium optmized binaries:
- My tests whow around 15%.
- 50% increase one one program claimed.
- The pgcc group claims 5% to 15%, 30% in some cases. This is probably lower
  for egcs, it's not as aggressive.
- No-one has indicated that they think these speed increses too low to make
  the project not be worthwhile.

Naming problems:
  trademark:
  - "pentium" is a trademark of intel.
  - Intel may dislike use of pentium, they are required by law to enforce
    their trademarks.
  - Debian-ultrasparc has been renamed to debian-ultralinux because of
    trademark problems.

  other
  - egcc does use pentium ("-mpentium") to identify this optimization, not
    "-m586".
  - It's possible that the pentium optimizations will also make programs run
    faster on pentium II, and on pentium clones (586 machines). Noone knowns.

I'd suggest, if anyone can find a noticible speed increase on a pentium
clone, we bypass the whole problem and call it 586. It may be worthwhile to
call it 586 anyhow so we don't have to worry about intel.

Implementation:
- We've decicded that it is better implemented by an architecture, rather
  than the Optimization tag hack.
- I have made the necessary changes to dpkg so it looks at
  /etc/dpkg/architectures.
- This change will likely help other ports as well, though I haven't heard
  from them.
- I've posted my changes and a patch to debian-dpkg for review and comment.
  No objectors so far.

If we can clear up the naming problem and people agree with the points in
this summary about speed, then I think we can set up the architecture on the
ftp site now.

-- 
see shy jo


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