Re: Re: RFS: ballview : new package version
Le Thu, Jan 25, 2007 at 03:55:42PM +0100, Andreas Moll a écrit :
> The problem is, that my application is based on roughly 500,000 lines
> of code, that we developed in the last years. I can not guarantee that
> it will work on the other platforms, especially because we are
> dependent on external libraries, that may show unsuspected behaviour.
> What is even worse: I have no computer available to test our software
> for example on a power pc architecture. What happens if my package
> fails to build on such a machine and I get a critical "Fails to
> build"error?
Hi Andreas,
As BALLview is a new package, if it fails to build on one architecture,
its propagation to the testing distribution will not be impaired. This
lets you one year or two to either fix the problem or drop arch support
before inclusion in the next stable release of Debian (as Etch is
frozen, BALLview will not be part of it).
As Steffen said, most Debian ports are supported by enthousiast
developper very loyal to their favorite architecture. They can, and
will, help you to fix the bugs. As you are interested in portability, it
is very useful for you. We have seen in the recent years major changes
in mainstream platforms : the PC world migrates to amd64, and the Mac
world migrated to intel processors. What will be the next move ? No one
knows. For instance, a company is deveolpping 16-core mips
processors. Will there be machines with that kind of processor in
structural biology labs in the future ? Who knows, but Debian gives you
an opportunity to have your package built and debugged on mips even if
you do not think that there can be users on this arch today.
I will try to build your package overnight on powerpc, and tell you the
result tomorrow (japan time...). I hope that you can enble ppc support
in the meantime.
PS: Thanks for your post on debian-science.
Have a nice day,
--
Charles Plessy
http://charles.plessy.org
Wako, Saitama, Japan
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