On 22/02/2005 at 10:11 Wouter Verhelst wrote...
<snip>
> I agree that we should not continue to provide software for outdated
> hardware platforms just for the sake of it; but as it is, there are
> still people interested in m68k (some hobbyists, some embedded
> developers, some who just use their old trusty hardware as their home
> firewall, etc) and, I'm sure, other currently less-used hardware, so as
> long as a port doesn't continually stall the release (which none
> currently does; there are occasionally problems, but that happens in
> every major undertaking), I see no reason to drop any port.
>
Regarding this issue I was thinking about it since I've faced in a
situation where a package[0] I maintain does have "high" hardware
requirements, which led me to think if it is really wise to have it
with "arch: any" since probably in some arches it would not ever be
installed/used, or even if case it will run really slow or even crash
and the user will not enjoy the software as was intended by upstream,
so maybe it doesn't make sense to have this software sent to
autobuilders and waste their resources/time for this, probably there
are more software with the same kind of hw reqs. in Debian.
I think if each package does specify the arches where it could
*actually* be used/installed will save time and resources, which can be used
the most urgent/important ones, so in the end this probably would help the
situation for buildds' disk space, mirrors claiming not having disk
space to add another arch, large queue on buildds and posibibly make
life easier for porters and Debian releases.
I don't know much about buildd infrastructure[1], if such thing was
proposed or commented before (didn't check archives), if there's
another way to handle this, or if such things probably could be better
handled as a policy (to enforce and be more strict on this due growing
number of packages) for maintainers double check the arch: line to
question themselves if its really worth to have "any" or just put
there only the ones which does. I'd rather be more helpful than "hey
let's do this" but imho this could be easily addressed by encouraging to
double checking "arch", unless there are better options.
regards,
Rudy
0- torcs, a 3D OpenGL game, it needs at least 550MHZ CPU, >32MB OpenGL
1.3 Video Card and so on... upstream says it works on i386 and ppc
(both confirmed by me) but have no news from other', it has built
sucessful though.
1- although this tread is very informative
--
Rudy Godoy | 0x3433BD21 | http://stone-head.org ,''`.
http://www.apesol.org - http://www.debian.org : :' :
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