Re: anyone still here?
Hi,
In the article <[🔎] 200403050314.i253EUs01308@mule.m17n.org>,
NIIBE Yutaka <gniibe@fsij.org> wrote:
> Ryan Underwood wrote:
> > This port has been dead for a while. I'm curious if any of the issues
> > regarding SH3/SH4 binary compatibility (FPU emulation, delay slot) have
> > had solutions proposed or issued since activity last was going on.
> >
> > It seems that we can build binaries that work on both SH3 and SH4
> > by reducing the performance on SH4 slightly and requiring SH3 to emulate
> > a FPU by the kernel. Right? What else is holding things back? The
> > existing problems of SH3<->SH4 do not seem to be insurmountable, and it
> > seems we can ignore big endian because nobody who has such a machine has
> > ever spoken up.
>
> I think that it's not true.
>
> The things I know is that Debian ignored two important things:
>
> (1) Existing difference of ABI between SH3 and SH4
> (2) Existing bigendian hardwares
>
> And someone insisted (wrongly) it could be merged, or ignored.
I also feel it's difficult to change the ABI itself... It has been
the industrial standard for a long time.
> Well, (2) could be ignored, if we count the demands. But (1) is not.
> I think that such a attitude of Debian is contradiction to the Social
> Contract, which priority is users' benefit. The industry distingushs
> the ABI difference of SH3 and SH4. I don't know the reason why Debian
> resuses to understand.
>
> I think that that's the part of the reason why this porting activity
> is dead. I'm sure that if Debian treats the ABI difference rightly,
> it goes well.
The dpkg and other needed tools have known those ABI difference as
seen in dpkg-architecture and archtable of dpkg's source, which is
enough to do porting Debian to sh machines itself.
The problem which should be discussed here is about debian.org's
infrastructure. Currently the package repository (ftp.debian.org) has
only useless directory "binary-sh". We should remove it before
anything else.
IMHO, there's no particular demand for having the *official* package
repository for any arch of sh. And platforms currently available are
generally too slow and short of resources to keep up with sid.
Regards,
--
YAEGASHI Takeshi<t@keshi.org> <takeshi@yaegashi.jp> http://www.keshi.org/
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