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Re: -= PROPOSAL =- Release sarge with amd64



On Tue, Jul 13, 2004 at 11:36:22AM -0400, Raul Miller wrote:
> On Tue, Jul 13, 2004 at 10:03:47AM -0400, Clint Adams wrote:
> > Perhaps you could suggest a preferable course of action for him to
> > follow instead.
> 
> I think there are several problems that need to be solved.
> 
> The big one is that amd64 isn't up on our main site at all.  This
> obviously need to get fixed.  [Although you can run i386 debian on an
> amd64 machine, the i386 system will not run run amd64 software, nor is it
> suitable for developing amd64 software.  And there are some applications
> which are much simpler on a 64 bit machine than on a 32 bit machine.
> For example, anything which involves mmapping very large files.]

The biggest benefit is the doubling of the gp registers, 16 instead of 8,
which increases speed a lot.

> If we included amd64 in sarge, it would be a rather unstable instance
> of sarge, which wouldn't be good -- but it would provide far more
> functionality than the non-existant amd64 in woody, so that would be good.
> If it were included with sarge, with the caveat that it's a development
> snapshot, and not really "stable", that might "work" to solve the "make
> it available" problem.

I doubt this release would be much more unstable than our alpha/ia64
releases. We found several 64bit issues that are not specific to amd64
while porting to amd64. Of course amd64 will likely be more used than
either of those other archs. Also note we still don't even track bugs by
version so we really have no idea what bugs still exist in sarge after
being fixed in sid anyway (think all the massive stalls). IMHO we
shouldn't be releasing sarge until we can have a way to track by package
version so that we have some idea on what bugs are in the release... ymmv


Chris

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