Re: Debian GNU/(k)NetBSD and sparc32 hardware?
Hi,
Ulrich Teichert <krypton@ulrich-teichert.org> writes:
> That's not quite true. Dave Miller is still collecting patches, Mark
> Fortescue, Krzysztof Helt and others are producing them. See the respective
> posts on sparclinux@vger. It's just that there is no real maintainer
> for the port.
[...]
> Call me a chicken, but I still think it will be less work to just fix the
> issues in the kernel and use the existing stuff instead.
That's the whole issue. I am under the impression (perhaps wrongfully)
that Linux development is moving at a high pace, not considering support
of "legacy" hardware as a high priority. For instance, the first 2.6
releases introduced significant regressions wrt. SPARC32 support
compared to 2.4. Only now is 2.6 starting to catch up with 2.4, thanks
to the work of a few people.
Conversely, it seems that NetBSD values continued support more, judging
from the mailing list archives of various ports (including, e.g., the
still active VAX port!). It's probably following a much more
conservative development approach, less biased towards newer hardware.
> I agree that a new debian architecture would be more fun, but
> splitting up the remaining debian sparc32 developers between NetBSD
> and Linux does not sound too healthy for me.
Agreed. In the short term, it does seem "easier" to try and fix Linux'
SPARC32 support. However, I'm wondering whether that would be a good
long-term investment.
Now, similar issues may also arise with other architectures, too.
Thanks,
Ludovic.
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