On Tue, Sep 19, 2006 at 04:42:16AM -0700, Brian Morris wrote: > my impression of the current situation is that there > is some fairly heavy politicking goings on here. one > the action is not consistent with debian's published > values of inclusiveness. > also to give people the freedom to participate in future > developments, let us assume it is not always going to be > organized around simply quantity. I'm not saying quantity isn't a problem or that politics isn't annoying, but the m68k port's biggest problem since gcc-4.0 rolled out has been the toolchain. Roman Zippel has done some serious and great work fixing our toolchain over the past two months or so. We're down to about 16 packages blocking 146 or so and a total of 72 packages failed due to m68k-specific problems. The largest blocker is gjdoc with 60 packages, which moved from arch all and neatly exposed our java problems. If Roman keeps fixing bugs at this rate, I wouldn't be surprised if we cleared that backlog before the end of the year. Although I doubt the toolchain is going to get revved everytime he fixes a bug, since it should be headed for freeze. But that doesn't mean the RM's should give us special treatment. These aren't new problems and some of those packages haven't built for something like two years. I think we do need to have a discussion about ports that don't build the full archive, but otherwise can make a stable release and get security support. Certainly m68k and likely arm users won't be running all the latest bloatware and thus don't need to be building it (how long would it take to load openoffice under kde on my m68k mac or even the fastest ataris?). But drawing that line can be tricky because of dependencies. I don't think anyone who really cares about the issue has come up with a good way to frame the discussion or draw those lines yet. I'd still like a stable, security-supported, m68k port. It doesn't need all of kde or gnome or openoffice. I don't know that anyone will ever try to run gnucash or gnuradio on it. I know there is interest in running X, web and mail servers, and irc clients. Anything less will make it hard to support the port and two years to another release is a long time. Okay, that's more than I intended to write. Peace, Stephen -- Stephen R. Marenka If life's not fun, you're not doing it right! <stephen@marenka.net>
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