Michael K. Edwards wrote:
AJ's categorization has some traction, but I think it's a somewhat short-term perspective.
I was kind-of hoping it wasn't even that: we've been supporting all these architectures for over two years now; are they really completely useless?
I think Sarge on ARM has the potential to greatly reduce the learning curve for some kinds of embedded development, especially if Iyonixsucceeds in its niche (long live the Acorn!).
So, I looked at the website, but all I can see are expensive PCs that happen to have an arm chip. Put them behind a firewall on a trusted LAN, use them to develop software for arm chips, and then just follow unstable or run non-security-supported snapshots. Apart from writing software for embedded arm things, I can't see the value -- and if an arch is just going to be used for development, does it really need all the support we give stable in order to make it useful for servers and such? If so, why? If not, what level of support does it need, that goes beyond "unstable + snapshotting facility", and why? Debian developers manage to develop on unstable fairly well, eg, why isn't that enough? Is this just a PR issue, in that "unstable" and "snapshot" aren't something you can put on a brochure or brag about on slashdot?
Seriously, I'm not really looking for comparisons to i386 (least of all in the "but i386 will be dead soon too!" sense), just "Yeah, we use these machines for this purpose; we're serious about it for these reasons; we need this level of support from our OS vendor because of these considerations (and, eg, FooBar provides it thus...)."
I guess this is really the wrong place to ask for "we use these machines" answers instead of "we develop for these machines", but hey.
Cheers, aj