Re: buildd/porter/maintainer roles again

[Hector Oron <hector.oron@gmail.com>]

Dear Petter,

2010/7/13, Petter Reinholdtsen <pere@hungry.com>:
> I believe it is a good idea for Debian to drop
> the lesser used architectures to ensure they do not slow down the rate
> of improvement in Debian.

I am proud of the amount of architectures Debian supports. I also
understand its overhead, but I think that having software that runs on
any processor makes Debian one of the best choices out there.

I would also like to point you to http://blog.aurel32.net/?p=58

> Those caring for an architecture (which I assume is the set of porters
> and buildd administrators) need to be the ones responsible for
> providing patches to package maintainers to get the architecture
> working with a given package.  Of course this work need to be done
> together with the package maintainers, but I believe it is
> unreasonable to expect maintainers to spend time on trying to get
> their packages working on architectures they do not care for, and am
> sure it is the way to get Debian to throw out lesser used
> architectures.

Maintainers are the ones that know best their software, they are
encouraged to maintain their packages in best manner following a
strict policy and following strict verification and validation
procedures. In Debian, it is requested to have that software built in
all arches (or at least as much as you can get). Porters are there to
help out, but you can not put all the amount of work for all the
failing software on an architecture to the porters for such
architecture.

Best regards,
-- 
 Héctor Orón

"Our Sun unleashes tremendous flares expelling hot gas into the Solar
System, which one day will disconnect us."