Re: Willing to test IA64 builds of Debian and kernel with other distributions if needed
Hi Frank!
On Wed, 2023-09-27 at 21:15 +0200, Frank Scheiner wrote:
> Again for Linux, Linus had a different opinion back in February and also
> backed that with information provided by `git log [...]`:
>
> ```
> [...]
>
> IOW, I'm more worried about "ia64 makes it a pain to make _generic_
> changes".
>
> IOW, doing something like this:
>
> git log -p --no-merges --since=1.year arch/ia64/
>
> to see what kind of pain ia64 parts of patches have caused, about a
> third of them are that "look, somebody cared about ia64 explicitly".
>
> And then the rest are trivial fixups for generic changes that aren't
> any different from any other architecture. The only half-way
> complicated one is the SET_FS removal, and I don't think it was any
> worse than most other architectures.
>
> IOW, it doesn't look like ia64 causes any huge issues _per_se_. I
> suspect alpha continues to be more of a pain.
>
> That said, it's entirely possible I've missed some particular painpoint.
>
> But when it's actively known to be broken and nobody has time or
> interest to look at it, at that point the "it doesn't look any more
> painful than other architectures" becomes kind of moot.
> ```
You're talking about the kernel here only though and not the toolchain
or glibc. In glibc, for example, many of the tests are failing [1] with
one of the glibc upstream maintainers telling me there is zero chance
these issues are going to be fixed.
Do we just want to ignore these forever and just build glibc manually all
the time with the testsuite disabled?
> If I interpret it correctly there seem to be two distinct groups of
> upstream developers in this regard: the ones that have to work on ia64
> as part of their work area and want it gone loudly and the ones that
> just work on ia64 as part of their work area and keep going.
>
> The people here (You for sure, Pedro, Dimitri, me and maybe Mike, too
> and maybe others, too) and there (Tomas) would surely like to work with
> both of them to keep ia64 going. Together we have the machines **and**
> the expertise.
I'm not doing any relevant ia64 upstream maintenance and I don't think this
is true for the others that you are counting to the second group. I think
it would be dishonest to claim that anyone in this group is doing actual
maintenance at the moment.
Adrian
> [1] https://buildd.debian.org/status/fetch.php?pkg=glibc&arch=ia64&ver=2.38-3&stamp=1694223476&raw=0
--
.''`. John Paul Adrian Glaubitz
: :' : Debian Developer
`. `' Physicist
`- GPG: 62FF 8A75 84E0 2956 9546 0006 7426 3B37 F5B5 F913
Reply to: