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Re: current mozilla or phoenix debs for PPC?



Chris Tillman wrote:

On Mon, Jul 21, 2003 at 01:39:42PM +0200, Michael Schmitz wrote:
using debian stable for the last year now... and am still stuck with
mozilla 1.0.0 .. are there any other apt-sources that i can add such
that i can update mozilla to 1.4 - or even better get a binary of
Phoenix?
This really sucks right now in Debian, agreed. The ports of greater
popularity gets hold by the compilation speed and technical problems of
other ports. :-(
Well, I'll rise to the bait ...

Please keep in mind that compilation speed and technical problems of other
ports is exactly what brought you today's support architecture of build
dependencies, build-from-source systems like sbuild, autobuilders, just to
name a few. Hell, Debian on m68k Macs was there before Debian on Powermacs
and other PowerPC machines.

Package quality has improved a huge lot over the years, but there's still
a lot to be done. And the more architectures to shake out bugs on, the
better.

Thank you for your attention. We now return to your regular scheduled
programming.

	Michael

Well, it's true we owe our elders respect (as I give a quick glance
towards my Mac IIci). But, OTOH, I think the current philosophy of
all-or-none may be a little too inflexible. Especially as m68k users
get fewer and fewer, and developers appear to be an endangered
species. We need a plan for quiet, benign senility where some
architectures are concerned. This does not involve leaving them out in
the cold to die, just restricting them to given (working) versions
and letting the rest go on.

I disagree. When you start doing this you end up splitting out all the non-mainstream ports and end up with a Debian that will only boot on x86. Remember, PPC people are a minority in the Linux world. Yes, the m68k people are an even bigger minority, but that's not really the point. It's like killing off illegaly imported parrots because they are endangered species (yes, this happens in Norway right now. Yes, you need to be a bureaucrat(sp?) to come up with that solution).

The way forward would be to make people stop creating software that doesn't compile on platforms like m68k. Is there any good reason why an application should only work on ONE cpu? ;-)

Also, we're compiling for i386 on i686 (does _anyone_ even use 386 machines any more?), so why not compile for m68k on say, i686 or even powerpc? It's only the next step, not a different world ;-)

--
AmigaOne dev list FAQ (when I say F, I mean F):
http://www.samfundet.no/~olegil/amiga/
Some "useful" packages:
http://www.samfundet.no/~olegil/debian/powerpc/description.txt





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