Bernhard R. Link wrote:
* Kyle McMartin <kyle@mcmartin.ca> [080616 21:09]:Holding up Debian because of a minority of people with a small amount of time to work on things doesn't seem entirely fair.I do not think this is an fair assesment. Take some examples: bugs.debian.org/453903: This one is one severe data corruption in ghostscript. It caused crashes on sparc and hppa on total unrelated places than where the fault is because hppa and sparc do not like unaligned access. I deem it highly likely that some other of our architectures got the same data corruption but just noone noticed. Making such hard-to-catch bugs reproducible and easy to catch is a service to all other architectures. http://lists.debian.org/debian-hppa/2008/06/msg00013.html and thread Here the problem is that qt has generic routines that do not even compile. http://bugs.debian.org/458133: This is just some other little bug in qt. Why is it hppa's fault that qt people never seems to have heared about alignment? That might just as well hit other architectures, too, in the future.
I fully agree, that having multiple platforms with different (maybe even strange) requirements keeps up the quality of the code in general. I'm saying this with my background from a commercial software vendor, where I face such problems each day and I'm happy that we are supporting such a zoo of platforms...
(Qt often has problems like that, I think your "because of a minority of people with a small amount of time to work on things" seems to perfectly fit on qt maintainers, at least in comparison to the bugs and low quality of source qt has...)
No, Qt code quality in general is really good. It's unfair to blame the Qt people for that.What I agree on is, that the Qt (fairly small) _platform_ _specific_ code needs to be done by people interested in that specific platform, esp. if it's a platform which the Qt people don't care about from a commercial perspective.
Back to the general discussion:Personally I would love to see a stable debian release of hppa at some point. I don't care if it's lenny or a later version, but at least that we get there at some point.
Helge