Paul Wise wrote:
On Fri, Jan 2, 2015 at 2:12 AM, Mark Morgan Lloyd wrote:
From experience with various older systems- SPARC, PPC Mac and so on- I
suspect that Lenny is a bit of a "sweet spot" after which the number of
feasible platforms will drop rapidly.
For the ARM platforms Debian has increased support since lenny AFAICT.
PowerPC is still supported in jessie.
I was specifically talking about older *systems*, not chips. ARM has
clearly reached "critical mass" because of tablets etc., and that's fine
until the Next Big Thing comes along.
We have had to drop alpha, hppa, ia64 and sparc due to lack of people
caring about these architectures. They could easily be revived if
someone did though, especially because of the bootstrap and
cross-compiler work being done by ARM people. SPARC is more likely to
get a sparc64 port but even that didn't get worked on enough for
jessie.
https://wiki.debian.org/Sparc64
Not a hope in Hell. Well, maybe 1%. Over the last year or so Oracle has
succeeded in changing SPARC from a commodity architecture to something
very similar to IBM's mainframes, and if Debian can't boot problems
upstream for 32-bit SPARC there's no reason to assume that 64-bit will
be any better.
Even if unavoidable, the loss of SPARC (and/or SPARC64) is unfortunate
since for about 10 years it was possible to pick up nice big SMP systems
on eBay, which could exercise aspects of threading etc. that other
architectures could not reach.
Multiarch obviously introduces its own problems.
Could you provide some examples? Multiarch seems unrelated to the
portability of Debian. In fact I think it has a more positive impact
on portability, since for less portable software you can workaround
that by installing binaries from another architecture and running them
directly where possible or use qemu-user to emulate them where not
possible.
I'm definitely not blaming Debian for anything, but there are still
occasional rumblings in areas like the Free pascal Compiler due to
residual library path issues.
--
Mark Morgan Lloyd
markMLl .AT. telemetry.co .DOT. uk
[Opinions above are the author's, not those of his employers or colleagues]
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