Re: porting Mozart to alpha, arm, hppa, mipsel, s390

[Denys Duchier <Denys.Duchier@ps.uni-sb.de>]

Matthew Wilcox <willy@debian.org> writes:

> On Sat, Apr 20, 2002 at 08:17:10PM +0200, Denys Duchier wrote:
>> Unfortunately, since noone volunteered to help for arm and hppa, these
>> platforms will remain unsupported and I must now remove recognition
>> for them from ozplatform.
>
> You are wrong to test for platform.  It makes everybodys job harder.
> I am not willing to work with you under these conditions.

A little less ignorance and little more tolerance might prove more
helpful to us all.

There is very little that depends on platform recognition. (1) a
platform specific suffix is used for dynamically loadable shared
object libraries so that they can be properly identified in an
heterogenous multiplatform installation, (2) platform specific
compiler options can be selected for optimal performance (this is very
compiler+platform specific and is arrived at through experimentation
and benchmarking), (3) issues related to dynamic loading and shared
object libraries are platform specific (no, we cannot use libtool),
(4) checking for libraries when requirements differ between platforms
(I see one case where we need to distinguish between win32, irix6*,
and everything else) and occasionally having to do something different
on Windows.

Yet, despite defensive configuration there is no guarantee that the
system will properly work on a new platform.  Only after running the
test suite can we gain reasonable confidence that all is indeed well.
That is another reason for having "officially" recognized platforms:
these are platforms for which we have obtained confirmation that the
system builds and performs correctly.

Cheers,

-- 
Dr. Denys Duchier			Denys.Duchier@ps.uni-sb.de
Forschungsbereich Programmiersysteme	(Programming Systems Lab)
Universitaet des Saarlandes, Geb. 45	http://www.ps.uni-sb.de/~duchier
Postfach 15 11 50			Phone: +49 681 302 5618
66041 Saarbruecken, Germany		Fax:   +49 681 302 5615


-- 
To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-hppa-request@lists.debian.org
with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmaster@lists.debian.org