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The role of niche architectures and toy ports in Debian
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Marco d'Itri
Feb 28, 2012, 7:23:02 PM2/28/12
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In the last few days, people on the debian-devel mailing list have been
debating again (and again, and again...) how much the ports and
architectures used only by an handful of people should influence the
direction of the project. With this post I want to briefly summarize my
position.
The reason we support niche architectures and toy ports is that that
some people are interested in doing the work, and that these do not
hinder development of the architectures that people actually use.
When m68k started inconveniencing too much the real world development,
the port was killed and the sky did not fall, notwithstanding the
complaints of the few retrocomputing enthusiasts who still used and
developed it.
I do not mind if some people like to play with kFreeBSD and Hurd as
long as they do not inconvenience me too much, both as a user and as a
developer.
While it is true that targeting multiple architectures helps finding
bugs, after we have covered all the useful combinations of endianity,
size of variables and char signedness the incremental benefits of
adopting a new architecture just for its sake are minimal.
I am a Red Hat customer (also because of Debian shortcomings), I do not
like it much and I do not want to be one forever: please do not kill my
hopes.
Permalink: http://blog.bofh.it/debian/id_420
debating again (and again, and again...) how much the ports and
architectures used only by an handful of people should influence the
direction of the project. With this post I want to briefly summarize my
position.
The reason we support niche architectures and toy ports is that that
some people are interested in doing the work, and that these do not
hinder development of the architectures that people actually use.
When m68k started inconveniencing too much the real world development,
the port was killed and the sky did not fall, notwithstanding the
complaints of the few retrocomputing enthusiasts who still used and
developed it.
I do not mind if some people like to play with kFreeBSD and Hurd as
long as they do not inconvenience me too much, both as a user and as a
developer.
While it is true that targeting multiple architectures helps finding
bugs, after we have covered all the useful combinations of endianity,
size of variables and char signedness the incremental benefits of
adopting a new architecture just for its sake are minimal.
I am a Red Hat customer (also because of Debian shortcomings), I do not
like it much and I do not want to be one forever: please do not kill my
hopes.
Permalink: http://blog.bofh.it/debian/id_420
gabor....@gmail.com
Nov 17, 2012, 6:09:01 PM11/17/12
to
On Wednesday, 29 February 2012 01:23:02 UTC+1, Marco d'Itri wrote:
> I am a Red Hat customer (also because of Debian shortcomings), I do not
> like it much and I do not want to be one forever: please do not kill my
> hopes.
Sorry, for being off-topic, but what is your problem with Debian (and I guess all Debian based distros like Ubuntu)? I'm just curious.
> I am a Red Hat customer (also because of Debian shortcomings), I do not
> like it much and I do not want to be one forever: please do not kill my
> hopes.
Thanks,
Gabor 'Morc' Kormos.
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