Re: Re-evaluating architecture inclusion in unstable/experimental
On 29.09.2018 00:30, John Paul Adrian Glaubitz wrote:
> On 9/28/18 11:26 PM, Adam D. Barratt wrote:
>> On Fri, 2018-09-28 at 14:16 +0200, John Paul Adrian Glaubitz wrote:
>>> So, it's not always a purely technical decision whether a port
>>> remains a release architecture. It's also often highly political and
>>> somehow also influenced by commercial entities.
>> Please don't make implications like that unless you can back them up.
> Well, I cannot prove it. But when I see that we have ports as release
> architectures with hardware where atomics in hardware don't even work
> correctly and the virtual address space is limited to 2 GiB per process
> while on the other hand perfectly healthy and maintained ports like
> powerpc and ppc64 which have actually a measurable userbase and interest
> in the community are axed or barred from being a release architecture,
> then I have my doubts that those decisions aren't also driven by
> commercial interests or politics.
Please excuse my ignorance, but which architecture do we still have with
2 GiB address space? The main point of removing s390 was that this was
unsustainable.
> I have seen IBM people on multiple occasions in various upstream
> projects trying to remove code for older POWER targets because
> they insisted anything below POWER8 is not supported anymore. In
> some cases like Golang with success [1].
Yeah, IBM behavior has been incredibly frustrating here on the System z
side, too. Essentially they end up actively removing support for
anything they don't support anymore.
To some degree I understand this behavior: It's a real relieve to not
need to support something old and crufty when you're the engineer on the
other side having to do that. Even when such support is contributed,
someone needs to keep it working and they won't keep old hardware around
for that.
But it has very awkward implications on the people that still have that
hardware for one reason or another and don't actually rely on a support
contract.
For s390x I can say that the port was driven without any commercial
interest on both Aurelien's and my side.
Kind regards
Philipp Kern
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