An (flamebait ?) idea to preserve debian on sparc32...

[romain@dolbeau.org (Romain Dolbeau)]

Hello all,

I know I'm going to get flamed but here I go anyway...

Right now it seems the sparc32 port is in trouble, due primarily to the
kernel having support problem. It can be summed up by :

1) The 2.4 kernel has trouble on some 4m hardware, and 2.6 is almost
non-working ;

2) userland (mostly glibc) doesn't work on v7 hardware (all sun4 and
sun4c arch, plus the SM100 modules on sun4m).

So my idea is: why not go over to a kernel and libc that actually
support all of the above ? Namely, the NetBSD kernel...

Debian already has started support for NetBSD on i386 and alpha ; why
not try and add both sparc32/v7 and sparc32/v8 (the second being able to
re-use most of the first userland) to that list ? The regular sparc port
would become a pure v9 port, w/o the need to support legacy HW, and
people running Debian on sparc32 would be able to continue to do so.

Of course some will say "why don't you run NetBSD then ?", which I do on
my sun4 / sun4c (and even sun3 and sun3x :-) hardware, but I prefer
apt-get and friends for my userland, as I'm sure others do.

So, what do the sparc32 people think ?

-- 
Romain Dolbeau
<romain@dolbeau.org>