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Re: Debian on IA-64



Bdale Garbee <bdale@gag.com> writes:

> I am pleased to report that the IA-64 system on loan from HP to Agilent that
> is in my possession is now happily running Debian GNU/Linux natively.  This
> machine arrived in my hands a few weeks ago "for evaluation" without an 
> operating system loaded, and since what I wanted to evaluate was Debian...

...

> The current status is that I'm booting a 100% Debian root filesystem, and am
> finishing up getting the right pieces in place to "start over" building 
> packages that are fit for upload.  I have requested a binary-ia64 tree be 
> created, and expect that to happen soon.  Package uploads should begin within 
> the next week.  It seems completely possible that IA-64 could join the set of 
> supported ports for woody, but a lot of work remains between now and then! 
> 
> Before jumping the hurdle from running in the chroot environment to booting a 
> real Debian filesystem, we had over 600 .deb's built, including everything 
> relevant depended on by the boot-floppies package.  There are a few ugly hacks
> that need to be addressed, and a couple of repeatable internal compiler errors
> in the very pre-release version of the compiler we're running, but I do not 
> expect it to take very long to get a respectable number of packages built and 
> uploaded.

I realize many developers will make this kind of request but ...

In the past, attempts to build the r-base package, which I maintain,
have exposed compiler problems on different architectures.  As an
environment for statistical computing and graphics, R extensively
exercises both floating point and integer computation.  The `make
check' that is done as part of the process of building the r-base
Debian package performs several regression tests that can help
pinpoint bugs.

Those of us in the R Core Development Group would be very interested
in whether the r-base package can be built on the IA64.  I would be
happy to help in whatever way I can.



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