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Re: Bug#857172: Please enable SSE2 on amd64 and disable altivec on PPC ports



Στις 08-03-2017, ημέρα Τετ, και ώρα 17:34 +0100, ο/η John Paul Adrian
Glaubitz έγραψε:
> I'm not aware of any of such -altivec packages and stuff like atlas
> should be compiled from source on the target machine anyway for
> performance reasons.

That could be applied to many/most/all? packages, so why bother
packaging them in the first place? Sorry, that's not a very good
argument.

> I did a quick search and I could only find ardour-altivec. Any
> others?

Interesting, atlas-altivec is not released anymore, well, either it's
not supported for powerpc or they do runtime detection. Regardless, we
used to have more -altivec tagged packages, so either we have better
runtime detection or we're running seriously underperforming packages.

> You shouldn't make such statement without actually mentioning the
> section of the Debian Policy which states that Altivec has to be
> turned off by default or which makes a generic statement regarding
> this.

I did not mean to sound offensive, but it's just a fact. If a package
is built with altivec, it will fail on all non-altivec CPUs, so that by
definition makes the package unusable, hence a grave bug report. By all
means, let's change the minimum architecture requirements so that it's
not, and we set Altivec as mandatory but until we do that (and I
actually would vote for that with both hands), it is a grave bug. No
need to even quote policy for that, as right now powerpc port page
states those machines as supported.

> Also, powerpc is not a release architecture anymore, so I don't even
> know how relevant such statements from the Debian Policy would be
> nowadays.

Again I don't disagree there, but since it's not a release
architecture, we could just move on to newer CPUs and change the
minimum specs -which would IMHO be a good thing, as it would lower the
number of supported platforms to a much smaller and more manageable
set. I have enough PowerPC boxes here, but none without Altivec, so
even if I wanted to, I couldn't even test lack of the feature, and I
don't care enough to go into the trouble of doing that.

Regards

Konstantinos

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