Jim Gettys <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > On Mon, 2005-02-21 at 11:13 -0800, Brian Nelson wrote: >> On Mon, Feb 21, 2005 at 11:33:35AM +0100, Wouter Verhelst wrote: >> > On Sun, Feb 20, 2005 at 10:57:47PM +0000, Dirk Eddelbuettel wrote: >> > > But a total of eleven is insane. >> > >> > It is sometimes hard to get them all to work, yes. >> > >> > It also vastly increases the quality of the Free Software in our >> > archive, as we discover bugs that appear only on one architecture. >> >> That's an overstatement. Simply having two architectures (i386 and ppc) >> would be enough to reveal nearly all portability bugs. >> > > Actually, my long experience is that it takes more than 2; but at, say, > 4 systems (both byte orders, both 32 and 64 bits) you get most of them.
Errr, yeah, I was thinking of amd64 as well but forgot to explicitly say so. > More important at that point is getting better compiler coverage; gcc > and friends is *not* the only compiler suite in the world, and different > compilers uncover a different spectrum of bugs. Yeah, definitely. If our goal is making our software as portable and bug-free as possible, we'd be better off running fewer arches but with a greater variety of compilers. Now if there were only any viable free alternatives to GCC... -- Society is never going to make any progress until we all learn to pretend to like each other. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
