Re: What about: Debian cuts platform support

[Ludovic Courtès <ludo@chbouib.org>]

Hi,

Today, one hour, 3 minutes, 58 seconds ago, Frans Pop wrote:
> What will happen in the long term remains to be seen. There is a very 
> simple solution though: more active involvement from people who care in 
> those ports [1], especially in resolving kernel and porting issues and 
> maintenance of architecture specific software (like bootloaders).

In fact, I'm under the impression that those architectures being dropped
are not backed by any company-funded contributor.  For instance, while
the x86_64, x86, or even PPC ports benefit from contributions by a
number of people getting paid to work on that (be it as kernel
developers, toolchain hackers, etc.), it seems that ports to "elderly"
arches like sparc32 and m68k will now only ever evolve thanks to the
involvement of a bunch of individuals working on their spare time.

Unless I'm mistaken, that would (partly at least) explain why those
ports did not satisfy the requalification criteria in the first place.
On the longer term, that would suggest that these ports will hardly ever
be able to catch up with "mainstream" ports, due to the difference in
nature of the contributions they receive and to their relatively
slow pace.

> [1] Although that is unlikely to solve the issues for m68k as the basic 
> problem there is speed of the build daemons.

Right, and that gap is going to continue to grow between those elderly
arches (sparc32, m68k) and the mainstream arches...

Thanks,
Ludovic.