Bernhard R. Link wrote:
* Jurij Smakov <jurij@wooyd.org> [131005 12:38]:That's the theory. In reality, maintainers of large and complex software projects (like mozilla/firefox) do not really care about fringe architectures, and I don't see why this situation would improve with time.Large and complex software has many bugs so maintainers will not care for all of them equally. Having people care for them because the hit them on their architecture causes them to be fixed before they come back to bite everyone.A pragmatic (but less conceptually-correct) approach would be to convince sparc kernel maintainers to introduce unaligned memory access handling for userspace programs.For me that would make sparc totally uninteresting. Without the ability to find bugs (which sparc was always very good at, even though alignment was even stricter on hppa), sparc would just be another architecture hardly worth supporting at all, especially as the hardware is no more found as commonly as in former times and there is no longer that much a difference in quality so that using has become more a liability than a stability boost.
Having the option of raising misalignment traps should be selectable, like (I believe) it is on ARM. I agree that having it is valuable, but it can be an utter pain in the arse when basically you're just trying to do some useful work (e.g. to build software so that you can subsequently test it).
KDE on Squeeze and Wheezy is useless, since Konsole crashes whenever it tries to scroll. That also affects xfce, and it's a live bug. There are other issues scattered around, by and large affecting GUI-related stuff or the X infrastructure.
But now I find that headless machines, e.g. Netra X1, lock up at inopportune times, e.g. shortly after 06:25 GMT on Sunday morning but also at other times. This is fairly predictable but only affects busy systems, my suspicion is that it happens when a syslog message is processed while the message and/or syslog files are being archived.
I'm planning to revert to at least Squeeze (possibly with a kernel upgrade) or maybe even Lenny, which IMO- once some of the early X problems were fixed- was definitely the "sweet spot" for Debian on SPARC. Yes, I know I should be bug-reporting and I probably will once I've got a bit better handle on the issue, but ultimately I've got a job to do and a life to live and there's limits to the extent that I can get involved with Other Peoples' Projects- particularly when it appears that the ultimate custodians of the architecture prefer messing about in boats to cooperating with what's left of the community.
-- Mark Morgan Lloyd markMLl .AT. telemetry.co .DOT. uk [Opinions above are the author's, not those of his employers or colleagues]