Hi Wouter On 2019/04/01 13:55, Wouter Verhelst wrote: > One thing that Debian has historically been good at, is to produce ports > for various architectures. However, we're not the most widely ported; > Gentoo, for instance, has been ported to Interix and macOS[1]. NetBSD > has a few ports that we do not have, and its pkgsrc is available for a > large amount of other operating systems beyond NetBSD itself, including > macOS, HPUX, IRIX, AIX, QNX, and Solaris[2]. > > Should we try to catch up with these other systems in terms of ports? > Specifically today, should we try to make Debian usable on any of the > operating system kernels that I quoted above?
Having Debian run well on macOS would certainly be very useful for many macOS users, and might help get some of the way to get Debian running with a Darwin kernel, so I would see that as a reasonably positive contribution to the Debian eco-system. Last year Debian became available on the Windows app store. My Windows-using friends love it, for casual use it's often better than virtualising or dual-booting. (https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/p/debian/9msvkqc78pk6) QNX might be useful for people who need a real-time operating system. It seems that we don't have a kernel yet that deals as well with real-time needs in Debian. As for HPUX, IRIX, AIX, Solaris... meh. There might be some interesting aspects there but I don't think there's anything there that helps driving our mission forward or that will help Debian adoption or make Debian better or more accessible to our universal user base (mhuhahaha see what I did there). In terms of our official ports, I do hope that riscv64 becomes a first class citizen in Debian. It seems to have the potential to become ideal hardware to run a free software operating system on, and I think there's some scope for the projects to work together, and as I've mentioned in my platform, I would try to use my DPL powers to negotiate free hardware and good deals on RISC-V (and other free hardware platforms) machines. I also see lots of build failures for IA64, and that it's listed as discontinued on https://www.debian.org/ports/ - so I can't help but wonder what the point is of keeping that around. I've asked before on who uses that and imaged that someone would say "Oh we use a 100 of them at our university", but it's usually more along the lines of "I have one of them in my basement". I wonder what would happen if we sent those people some nice RISC-V hardware to play with instead :) -Jonathan -- ⢀⣴⠾⠻⢶⣦⠀ Jonathan Carter (highvoltage) <jcc> ⣾⠁⢠⠒⠀⣿⡁ Debian Developer - https://wiki.debian.org/highvoltage ⢿⡄⠘⠷⠚⠋ https://debian.org | https://jonathancarter.org ⠈⠳⣄⠀⠀⠀⠀ I'm very happy! I stole some schmuck's anti-depressants!
