Debian ports [was: Re: Weirdness in "apt-get upgrade"]
Colin Watson <cjwatson@debian.org> writes:
> It's also worth pointing out that the effort that some people see as
> being wasted on other ports actually benefits the distribution as a
> whole in the long run. For example, somebody complained a while back
> about the number of bugs filed because packages didn't build on hppa;
> what I suspect he didn't realize is that a large chunk of those bugs
> were about gcc 3 support in C++ packages, which will be i386's default
> compiler soon! It starts seeming a lot more worthwhile even to i386-only
> people at that point.
Hmm, I've been thinking about this point, and it seems almost like an
anti-argument to me. I can't think of a more inefficient way to port
software to gcc 3.x than to do it first on a platform that very few
people have access to. Presumably, woody's release has been delayed for
months due to problems with hppa while devs tried to find access to an
hppa machine for testing. However, if all arches had moved to gcc 3.x
synchronously, compilation problems across all packages probably would
have been fixed within a month since everyone has access to i386
machines for testing.
--
Brian Nelson <nelson@bignachos.com>
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