On 6/5/05, Steve Langasek <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > You can either step up and make sure the > architectures you care about are in good shape for etch, or you can be a > whiny brat expecting everything to be handed to you on a silver platter and > accusing people of being members of a Canonical-controlled cabal when they > do you the courtesy of informing you about their personal priorities for > etch. Your choice.
I am no fan of the Vancouver proposal, but Steve's got a point. Ensuring that packages build and run properly on a wide variety of architectures is _work_. I happen to think that it's worthwhile work, and that it's the main factor that sets Debian apart from all the rest and directly contributes to the superior quality of Debian relative to other distros. But if it isn't spread across a large number of people, it's a crushing burden, and no one has a right to ask the release team to shoulder it. The mirror network is not the big issue, as I see it; I care more about the question of whether the build procedures have adequate conditional logic to handle the presence/absence of a native-code compiler for language X, the existence or lack of an assembly-language implementation of core routine Y, etc. As I have argued previously, the diversity of architectures is the best available proxy for the evolution of platforms over time, and the packages which have a hard time building on all arches are precisely those which it's a struggle to maintain for the duration of a release cycle. Steve's also right that buildds that have non-zero queue depths for non-trivial lengths of time tend to expose fragility in build and run-time dependencies, and so they get stuck in ugly ways that need release team (or porter) attention. So either Debian collectively is willing to labor to maintain a high standard of portability and stability, or we need to focus on a few arches and ignore bugs-in-principle that don't happen to break on those systems. I know which one I'd like to see, but I have to admit that I have done a lousy job of following through so far on things that I could help with myself. But at least I don't go around blaming the people who are actually doing the work. :-/ Cheers, - Michael
