> >Can you give us examples of actions from the D-I team who could be > >used as illustrations of negligence towards the powerpc architecture > >users? > > Well, OK: > > The one that particularly got to me was the very long dry spell for > OldWorld PowerMacs during which etch would not boot on that > hardware. Sarge ran fine, but until the advent of the 2.6.18 series > of kernels, etch never got much beyond the bootloader(*). This > resulted in "genetic drift" of applications software (specifically > gstreamer is the one I know about. There are probably others.) > because it couldn't be tested. The result is that now there's a very > subtle release critical bug (#404876) and no time to fix it. > > As Mathew just pointed out: Kernels not booting may not be d-i's > fault, but it is their problem.
So, the hardware support comes in first, as it seems. From your POV, some PPC arches/subarches are neglected. Isn't there something the PPC users themselves an take care of, like more testing or even contributions to the kernel team (which, as many point out, is the first entry point for such issues)? > The underlying problem was that the infighting in the d-i team > distracted the in-fighters from taking bug reports on this topic > seriously. If Debian on powerpc hardware is to survive, the > infighting problem has to be solved. You can blame other people all > you want, but it won't solve the problem. By infights, I'll assume you mean the Sven Luther case as I see no other topic which fits this description. The D-I team works pretty well and many new contributors have joined it since the release of sarge while many others drifted their attention to other topics in Debian, as usual in such big projects. Do you have specific examples of bug reports about D-I components which show that the D-I team deliberately or inadvertently neglected issues bringed by the PPC community? Up to now, this thread started about one specific issue, which later all contributors have agreed is outside the scope and control of the D-I team. There are maybe other issues that fit the "D-I team has failed us" stanza which started this thread (the thread uses another title but that was clearly an opened accusation against the D-I team). > > I don't expect the people this is about to understand what I'm > talking about here. They are blinded by their own hatred, thus > unable to see the larger problem. There has been a communication problem with one powerpc community member, yes. This member has done many valuable contributions to D-I and the whole community, yes. He even put himself aside from the PPC port at some moment. How do you explain that all D-I release still had PPC support despite this? Sometimes good, sometimes bad...just like all ports. It is a very well known fact that *all* ports of D-I are loosely tested during the development, except those accessible to the very few people who give more than half of their Debian time to D-I. The PPC architecture is however used and accessible to much more users than any other but i386 and amd64. Isn't there something that the PPC community could do to circumvent the communication gap between Sven and the D-I team? Isn't this already happening?
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