Op vr 28-11-2003, om 06:40 schreef Scott Holder: > Chris Tillman wrote: > > > Well, it's true we owe our elders respect (as I give a quick glance > > > >towards my Mac IIci). But, OTOH, I think the current philosophy of > >all-or-none may be a little too inflexible. Especially as m68k users > >get fewer and fewer, and developers appear to be an endangered > >species. We need a plan for quiet, benign senility where some > >architectures are concerned. This does not involve leaving them out in > >the cold to die, just restricting them to given (working) versions > >and letting the rest go on.
I didn't see the quoted mail, as I'm not subscribed to -powerpc. Obviously, this argument has been brought up numerous times, and part of it is, most certainly, true (some packages really are useless on m68k). However, if we would decide to stop compiling some packages for the m68k architecture, there's a serious problem: How do we decide what packages we will build for m68k? If we do decide to stop building some packages, we have to draw a clear line somewhere; but it's hard to tell which packages are useless, and which aren't; there's no clear line to draw, only a (very) blurry one. The reason for this is that "useful" is a very subjective statement. Some people might find games a useless waste of time, for instance; in very much the same way, some people might think that running KDE on m68k is a useless waste of time, while others might disagree. Even if we did manage to find a good subset of packages which would be 'useful' for our users, I'm sure there will be questions of disappointed users inquiring why packages foo and bar are not available. For these reasons, we've decided not to go that way; we don't make any distinction on whether a package should be built; we build everything we're asked to build, and let users decide whether they want to install it or not. The "everything we're asked to build" part should be interpreted as "all packages that contain "m68k" or "any" in their "Architecture:" control field. Indeed, it has happened in the past that a maintainer removed m68k from his Architecture field because he thought the package was useless on m68k; in such a case, we won't build it, even if the package might compile. > Sorry for continuing the crosspost, > > I just recently accidently compiling Mozilla 1.5 for m68k, was aiming > for Firebird but didn't read the directions ;) . It works just fine, > too, though is basically unuseable. But, it runs and works. It took two > days to compile ;) Yes, that's the usual time. It's not the record-holder, though :-) (No, I don't know what the package with the longest build time is, but there are packages that require almost a week to build on m68k...) -- Wouter Verhelst Debian GNU/Linux -- http://www.debian.org Nederlandstalige Linux-documentatie -- http://nl.linux.org If you're running Microsoft Windows, either scan your computer on viruses, or stop wasting my bandwith and remove me from your addressbook. *now*.
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