Jurij Smakov wrote:
Certainly. For sure. No problem. And how long did it take Debian to sort out the known issue that screwed local X on a U1 etc? My understanding is that it /had/ been bug reported, and was generally believed to have been fixed in either the kernel or X, but it quite simply didn't get onto the Lenny CD or into the repositories resulting in a number of people who asked in this ML how to get their machines running and were basically told that they couldn't. Quite frankly, I gave up trying to work out detailed fixes for things- which is much more difficult for an outsider than it is for core developers- after I described my hack to get SMP working reliably on an SS1000E and came very close to being flamed by DM who didn't like one of my assumptions.I understand and sympathize with your frustration, as I've been in the same boat more than once. The situation with wheezy release, however, is quite simple: there is a list of bugs which release managers consider release-critical (updates and stats are posted weekly on planet.debian.net):http://udd.debian.org/bugs.cgi?release=wheezy&patch=&pending=&security=ign&wontfix=&upstream=&unreproducible=&forwarded=&claimed=&deferred=¬main=ign¬wheezy=ign&base=&standard=&merged=ign&done=&outdatedwheezy=&outdatedsid=&needmig=&newerubuntu=&fnewer=&fnewerval=7&rc=1&sortby=source&sorto=asc&cpopcon=1&cseverity=1&ctags=1There are currently 4 sparc-specific bugs there. For each of them I've either provided a fix or what I consider sufficient amount of debugging information for maintainer to do something useful with. If these bugs would get magically fixed overnight, from sparc point of view this would be a green light for release to proceed.Obviously, assuming that those are the only 4 RC bugs affecting sparc would be very naive. But if people do not bother reporting them, we'll never take any action, and release will proceed, again leading to complaints along the lines of "I can't believe this buggy stuff was deemed a stable release". And if the port does not have enough users reporting bugs even against the most common desktop environment to the point that it turns out to be hopelessly broken, maybe it's time to consider retiring it.
My apologies if I sounded unduly negative, but as you say, it's frustrating. I wonder if I could make a couple of suggestions:i) If somebody experienced with the platform and Debian procedures sees discussion of a reproducible problem, with or without a fix, he should suggest that the originator raise a bug and should specify the URL etc. to do so. Where the OP isn't able to do that but multiple people agree there's a problem, he should consider raising it on their behalf.
ii) My involvement with a different project has identified a number of issues caused by operand alignment errors which manifest themselves on both SPARC, (at least some) ARM, and possibly in some cases on x64; one of the reasons I run multiple platforms here is to allow me to distinguish between endianness and alignment errors. It could turn out to be useful if developers for the platforms had some way of coordinating effort.
-- Mark Morgan Lloyd markMLl .AT. telemetry.co .DOT. uk [Opinions above are the author's, not those of his employers or colleagues]