On Sun, 3 Sep 2006, Ludovic Court�wrote:
Just out of curiosity: would be "hard" technically to provide a `-sun4c' variant of some of those packages that now make use of the multiplication and division instructions not available on sun4c? At least for `libc6' (which you already provide [0])? I guess the issue is that APT would still install `libc6' by default instead of `libc6-sun4c', or is there a way to tweak it into doing the right thing?
That problem can be easily resolved by apt pinning, the repository containing the sun4c packages might be just assigned higher priority than regular archives.
There are more serious obstacles though. One thing which comes to mind, is that once woody is phased out, there no longer be a working installer for the sun4c machines. The instructions for making sarge run on sun4c machines relied heavily on the fact that both woody and sarge supported 2.4 kernels, and, therefore, one would not experience problems unstalling sarge's libc (compiled without optimizations) on a woody system. I doubt that one can make etch's libc run with 2.4 kernel, which is the last working kernel we have for sun4c. It all probably can be done, but will require a more significant effort, since it is even hard to predict what problems can arise.
Best regards, Jurij Smakov jurij@wooyd.org Key: http://www.wooyd.org/pgpkey/ KeyID: C99E03CC