On 04/29/2014 04:14 AM, Yaroslav Halchenko wrote:
With Debian dropping support for sparc unfortunately I would need to
stop providing similar "unique" testing opportunity for those projects,
which would not be the end of the world, but kinda a pity since sparcs
seems to be quite nice and which helped to gain more "geeky gratitude"
for Debian being somewhat unique in its spread of support.
Having people find the sparc port useful or using it is however not
enough to maintain it. There needs to be a commitment to fix issues and
to respond to inquiries about the current status. However there is
currently *nobody* doing this as demonstrated by the lack of replies to
the release teams concerns (see all the "bits from the release team"
mails on debian-devel-announce@ since the Wheezy release).
Axel Beckert was the only one who stepped up as a porter for sparc, but
he cannot look into the (existing) toolchain and kernel issues[1].
[1] <https://lists.debian.org/debian-sparc/2014/04/msg00034.html>
This needs to change or it is not realistic for Debian to be able to
keep this port (and I'm not sure sparc64 is in a much better state as a
possible replacement).
P.S. I wondered now if somehow we could attract students taking some
'advanced computer architecture' courses at the universities...
I personally would be more interested in an architecture where one can
actually purchase current hardware (sparc servers on oracle.com seem to
start at ~20k USD). There are quite a lot of those for what I
understand: arm*, mips*, ...