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

[dolbeaur@club-internet.fr (Romain Dolbeau)]

Chris Waters <xtifr@debian.org> wrote:

> But the Debian NetBSD project is using GNU usersland, which should
> include glibc, unless I'm greatly confused (which is certainly not out
> of the question).  So if glibc is a problem....

I don't know which libc is used by the Debian NetBSD people. But as the
libc is userland software, it should be possible to compile it to v7 and
v8 and have two packages, and rewrite the assembler bit that use the
mult instructions for the v7 version.

I assume the v8-only libc was done for performance reasons rather than
an actual problem with implementing it on v7 hardware. But I may be
wrong...

Splitting the port between sparc32-v7, sparc32-v8 and sparc-v9 would
permit multiple libc, with or without a kernel change, and with backward
availability of packages if the kernel is similar enough.

A question on the Debian dependency system: can it handle inter-archs
dependency ? i.e. is it already feasible (in theory) to split an arch in
two or more, and have dependency "fall back" from say v8 to v7 if a
package is not in v8, like it does with unstable/testing/stable ?

-- 
Romain Dolbeau