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Re: vancouver revisited



Gustavo Noronha Silva wrote:

Em Seg, 2005-08-22 às 00:34 +0300, Riku Voipio escreveu:
jffs2 image, which is then flashed to a pile of devices. Walking through d-i every time would be very clumsy, so there is no use
for a working installer for those systems.

There's no use for a full-blown stable release for such things, most of
the times, either.

See ya,

Yes, there is: one of the more frequent uses of minority architectures is diversity in internet-facing machines: I've run sparc, powerpc and MIPs machines in this role, and am currently running linksys (mips) box as my firewall / gateway / DMZ (doing more than that, of course). The security and stability of stable is whats important to me: it'll never run X or mozilla ;-)

This is why (some) people find the 'second class' nature of the Vancouver proposal so disturbing: not just whats happening now, but its cutting off such futures that we are working towards.

In my day job I am using Debian and openwrt (cut down Linux on linksys, etc) and with the resources on such boxes growing, and the ability to cut down linux (eg. replace glibc in base by ulibc, put base on a diet, etc.) we can forsee a time where Debian stable will run on such machines directly. However dropping Mips, etc. would cause a stagnation: just when you get the Debian base to fit on the machines, Debian stable is no longer supported on them. This is what we want to avoid.

Hence its important to avoid this: while I appreciate the reluctance to have architectures with "no users" in the archive, its having Debian available on the arch that makes it feasible to use the arch in your next project, and bring the users.

For this reason I think its important to work on the underlying _real_ techincal problem: some way of fixing the toolchain issues that make having the archs a problem. Solutions such as autobuilding the arch with upcoming toolchains in experimental, pulling more test suites into the build so that the packages are not just built but run on the archs, etc.

Regards
Alastair



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