On Mon, Aug 19, 2019 at 7:29 PM Sam Hartman <hartm...@debian.org> wrote:
> Your entire argument is built on the premise that it is actually > desirable for these applications (compilers, linkers, etc) to work in > 32-bit address spaces. that's right [and in another message in the thread it was mentioned that builds have to be done natively. the reasons are to do with mistakes that cross-compiling, particularly during autoconf hardware/feature-detection, can introduce *into the binary*. with 40,000 packages to build, it is just far too much extra work to analyse even a fraction of them] at the beginning of the thread, the very first thing that was mentioned was: is it acceptable for all of us to abdicate responsibility and, "by default" - by failing to take that responsibility - end up indirectly responsible for the destruction and consignment to landfill of otherwise perfectly good [32-bit] hardware? now, if that is something that you - all of you - find to be perfectly acceptable, then please continue to not make the decision to take any action, and come up with whatever justifications you see fit which will help you to ignore the consequences. that's the "tough, reality-as-it-is, in-your-face" way to look at it. the _other_ way to look at is: "nobody's paying any of us to do this, we're perfectly fine doing what we're doing, we're perfectly okay with western resources, we can get nice high-end hardware, i'm doing fine, why should i care??". this perspective was one that i first encountered during a ukuug conference on samba as far back as... 1998. i was too shocked to even answer the question, not least because everybody in the room clapped at this utterly selfish, self-centered "i'm fine, i'm doing my own thing, why should i care, nobody's paying us, so screw microsoft and screw those stupid users for using proprietary software, they get everything they deserve" perspective. this very similar situation - 32-bit hardware being consigned to landfill - is slowly and inexorably coming at us, being squeezed from all sides not just by 32-bit hardware itself being completely useless for actual *development* purposes (who actually still has a 32-bit system as a main development machine?) it's being squeezed out by advances in standards, processor speed, user expectations and much more. i *know* that we don't have - and can't use - 32-bit hardware for primary development purposes. i'm writing this on a 2.5 year old gaming laptop that was the fastest high-end resourced machine i could buy at the time (16GB RAM, 512mb NVMe, 3.6ghz quad-core hyperthreaded). and y'know what? given that we're *not* being paid by these users of 32-bit hardware - in fact most of us are not being paid *at all* - it's not as unreasonable as it first sounds. i am *keenly aware* that we volunteer our time, and are not paid *anything remotely* close to what we should be paid, given the responsibility and the service that we provide to others. it is a huge "pain in the ass" conundrum, that leaves each of us with a moral and ethical dilemma that we each *individually* have to face. l.
