Re: Let's remove mips, mipsel, s390, ... (Was: [Fwd: Re: GTK+2.0 2.6.2-3 and buildds running out of space])

[Jim Gettys <Jim.Gettys@hp.com>]

On Mon, 2005-02-21 at 11:13 -0800, Brian Nelson wrote:
> On Mon, Feb 21, 2005 at 11:33:35AM +0100, Wouter Verhelst wrote:
> > On Sun, Feb 20, 2005 at 10:57:47PM +0000, Dirk Eddelbuettel wrote:
> > > But a total of eleven is insane.
> > 
> > It is sometimes hard to get them all to work, yes.
> > 
> > It also vastly increases the quality of the Free Software in our
> > archive, as we discover bugs that appear only on one architecture.
> 
> That's an overstatement.  Simply having two architectures (i386 and ppc)
> would be enough to reveal nearly all portability bugs.
> 

Actually, my long experience is that it takes more than 2; but at, say,
4 systems (both byte orders, both 32 and 64 bits) you get most of them.

More important at that point is getting better compiler coverage; gcc
and friends is *not* the only compiler suite in the world, and different
compilers uncover a different spectrum of bugs.
				- Jim