On Fri, May 11, 2007 at 06:34:31PM +0900, Charles Plessy wrote: > Hi all, > > although this thread is not mega-friedly, I think that it gives the > opportunity to ask to the powerpc porters and buildd admins their > opinion on wether Debian needs a G5 machine or not.
Notice that the augsbourg machines are quad power5 IBM boxes, and no mere G5 machines. > One first argument is that G5 is faster, and that it is not because the > current buildd was not overloaded in the past that it will not be in the > future. Indeed, it was quite loaded this week. > > But I have another concern. In my experience, some debian source > packages do not build on G5 running the Debian powerpc port because > their ./configure scripts get confused by the "ppc64" string in the > uname output. Depending on how widespread this problem is, this has two > consequences: My opinion, is that such packages are buggy, and the problem should be fixed, probably at the build infrastructure level, with some smart substitution, if it has not been fixed already. I have not yet seen any such problem, and ubuntu use powerpc64 hardware as their powerpc buildds. Also notice that the only currently selling powerpc hardware is : 1) IBM server hardware 2) Genesi efika 3) Sony PS3 4) mercury blades. 5) a splattering of embedded devices not really suited to compiling packages on it. Except the Genesi Efika, all of those are powerpc64 machines. > a) Unless it is accepted that a debian package needs only to be > buildable on buildds, and not on any machine of the same arch, it could > mean that a big part of the archive would be FTBFS on powerpc. Huh ? Why should they FTBFS on a 32bit powerpc machine ? I understand from the above that it could fail on powerpc64, but i have some trouble following you the other way around. > b) As long as the problem is not fixed, the question of having or not a > G5 buildd has a clear answer : No. > > Clearly, pbuildding the whole archive on a G5 would give intersting > data. I am trying to do this, but due to my low level, I do not know > when I will succeed. Feel free to overtake me ! As said, ubuntu does this regularly since years. Friendly, Sven Luther -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
