Ansgar Burchardt wrote:
Hi, Philipp Kern <pkern@debian.org> writes:now that sparc has been dropped from testing, please decide on the fate of sparc in unstable.Are there still people interested in the current sparc port? I don't remember seeing any replies to the release team's concers regarding sparc, so my first impression is that people are no longer working on it... In that case I don't think we should keep it in the archive much longer.
There is still interest, but it appears to me that the SPARC target is falling further and further behind. I further get the impression that there's a lot of endianness or alignment issues in the bug list that either should have been booted upstream, or that have already been fixed upstream without the changes propagating to Debian.
In principle, an argument for keeping SPARC is that it's possibly the architecture that's most demanding of correct alignment etc. and if the number of users decrease further this will have an impact on the overall quality of open-source code.
In practice, it would be interesting to know how sincere Oracle are in their commitment to Linux on SPARC, and if they're sincere how they manage to ship something reliable while Debian struggles.
-- Mark Morgan Lloyd markMLl .AT. telemetry.co .DOT. uk [Opinions above are the author's, not those of his employers or colleagues]