Luk,
If you looked at https://buildd.debian.org/stats/graph-big.png I think it is obvious hppa is not *that* broken. hppa is >95% built. That is not that bad. Of course, it can be better, but if you looked at this with a historical perspective the port is really in a pretty good shape.There is no desire to trim working architectures. It's very easy to tell there is nothing wrong when you don't have to deal with unreliable build daemons, endless discussions but no visible progress (except for java support) and complaints from DSA, package maintainers and others.
If you looked at the status of the toolchain posted to the gcc-testresults page: http://gcc.gnu.org/ml/gcc-testresults/2009-06/ you can see that hppa is one of the better architectures out there. Our results are on par with (if not better than) other supported architectures.
IMHO hppa contributed a lot to getting Debian packages (and upstream) properly fixed to build properly across many other architectures and making it easier for new architectures to get incorporated into Debian. It's unfortunate that parisc is no longer a commercially popular platform, but why should not affect whether Debian supports it?
It's obvious from the recent exchange that there are still people on the hppa team (and other Debian maintainers) that are willing to work on this architecture to make things better. Also by many metrics it is still very much a working architecture. It's really a shame that Debian's considering dropping support for HPPA in Squeeze. Please reconsider.
randolph