Re: Bug#745938: FWIW -- I consider sparc useful, pity if its support ends completely
Le 29/04/2014 11:50, Ansgar Burchardt a écrit :
Hi,
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).
We are fixing issues at this moment.
I have some problem to know the bugs numbers that are high priority and
sparc-only,
however, I have time and a little knowledge to check the problems.
There are so many ML to read, I may have missed important call, but
reading all mails from 2 years ago is a bit too much.
If you need maintainer for sparc, just tell how to become one.
IMHO, the sparc architecture needs more tests and bug filling than
knowledgeable people.
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*, ...
Ansgar
Why not dropping the m68k port too then ?
I thought that debian was opensource and not driven by market share or
anything like that ?
Seb
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