Source: golang-defaults Version: 2:1.10~1 Severity: normal User: [email protected] Usertags: ppc64
Hi! With golang-1.9, Golang upstream unfortunately decided to drop POWER4 support from the Go compiler so that golang-1.9 and newer require a POWER8 machine to build golang on ppc64 [1]. While the change upstream doesn't really make much sense as there is no port of Linux that I know of that uses the POWER8 baseline for a ppc64 big-endian port (everyone uses the little-endian port) meaning the effective number of users of golang on ppc64 big-endian drops to zero, I was unable to convince upstream to revert this change. Most likely because I joined the discussion too late and the decision was already made. Although I have to say the assumptions made upstream are not correct as the PowerMac G5 is definitely not the only 64-bit PowerPC machine on the market which has a lower baseline than POWER8. There are designs based on embedded CPUs by Freescale, for example, like the PowerPC e5500 and e6500. But since the ppc64 port of Golang is maintained by IBM, I don't think there is much we can do to change their minds. We do have one buildd in Debian Ports, kapitsa, which is a POWER8 machine capable of building golang-1.9. However, since the official baseline of the port is POWER4 without Altivec, any Go binaries built with golang-1.9 or newer on the buildd kapitsa would not be usable for most of our users. We can still keep building golang-1.9 and golang-1.10 on ppc64, I will actually change the buildd configuration to limit these two packages to the buildd kapitsa. However, the default implementation of golang on ppc64 should be gccgo from now on and we will trigger a binNMU of all Go packages after this particular change has been made. Hence, please stop building golang-go, golang-src and golang for ppc64. Thanks, Adrian > [1] https://github.com/golang/go/issues/19074 -- .''`. John Paul Adrian Glaubitz : :' : Debian Developer - [email protected] `. `' Freie Universitaet Berlin - [email protected] `- GPG: 62FF 8A75 84E0 2956 9546 0006 7426 3B37 F5B5 F913
