appropriate architectures for packages
Hello All:
One of my main goals for contributing to Debian was to bring more
scientific software to the project in an integrated way. I am happy to see
the efforts on GEANT and ROOT and other important science related software
but I have been running up against a serious issue for packages which are
resource hungry and i would like to hear others' ideas about the subject.
For example, my package, fit2k, is a peak fitting GUI program which uses
wxgtk and the boost libraries. This is a very time intensive package to
compile and it has been known to hang some of the buildds for many many
minutes, resulting in a failed build. This begs the question of whether
the fityk package is of any real value to architectures such as m68k, arm
and even mips where processors are older and not often used with graphical
desktops. I am working on other packages for crystal structure solution
which require even more resources to run effectively and this problem will
only get worse.
I am tempted to just not even bother having the buildds try to build for
these architectures because the likelihood that someone will ever actually
_use_ fityk is vanishingly small even though it is possible to do so (in
principle). However, I feel a bit guilty about excluding them.
I apologize for the somewhat incoherent discussion but the crux of my
question is this:
At what point does it make no sense to expend a lot of effort to build a
package on architectures where the are not likely to be used (or even
usable)? Just because it _can_ be built on a particular architecture
does it _always_ make sense to do so?
I would be happy to hear your ideas on this.
Cheers,
Carlo
--
Carlo U. Segre -- Professor of Physics
Associate Dean for Special Projects, Graduate College
Illinois Institute of Technology
Voice: 312.567.3498 Fax: 312.567.3494
segre@iit.edu http://www.iit.edu/~segre segre@debian.org
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