Hi, I haven't followed as thoroughly as I would have liked the recent verborrhea in the list regarding the Vancouver proposal. Anyway, I'd like to raise a point that I brought up during Debconf3, in the light of the changes that we are now facing.
Most (although not all) of the architectures facing being downgraded are older, slower hardware, and cannot be readily found. Their build speed is my main argument against John Goerzen's proposal [1]. Now, I understand that up to now we have had the requirement of the builds running in the real hardware. Nowadays, an i386 system emulating a m68k (using either UAE or Basilisk2) is at least comparable to the fastest m68k system ever produced. I have worked with both emulators, and both seem completely safe - Yes, I know we cannot run Debian on a regular UAE because of the lack of a MMU in the official package, but we _can_ run it inside Basilisk2. A completely different problem with the same results arises when using s390 machines: As someone noted recently, most of us cannot afford having a s390 running in the basement. But AFAICT, Hercules is a quite usable s390 emulator. And I am sure we can find more examples like these - I have not really checked, but I would be surprised if architectures as popular as Sparc, Alpha or ARM wouldn't have an emulator (although probably not currently as reliable as those two). Now, if we face dropping one or more of our architectures (i.e. m68k) because new hardware can not be found anymore (the Vancouver proposal mentions that "the release architecture must be publicly available to buy new" in order to keep it as a fully supported architecture - I know, SCC != fully supported, but anyway, a buildd can die and create huge problems to a port), why shouldn't we start accepting buildds running under emulated machines? Greetings, [1] http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2005/03/msg01387.html -- Gunnar Wolf - [EMAIL PROTECTED] - (+52-55)1451-2244 / 5554-9450 PGP key 1024D/8BB527AF 2001-10-23 Fingerprint: 0C79 D2D1 2C4E 9CE4 5973 F800 D80E F35A 8BB5 27AF -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
