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Debian Release Mgr. Proposes Dropping Some Archs
smerdyakov writes "In this story posted by Andrew Orlowski of the Register Debian Release manager Steve Langasek has announced that support will be dropped for all but four computer architectures. Among the reasons cited for doing this are improving testing coordination, 'a more limber release process' and ultimately a ('hopefully') shorter release cyle. The main architectures to survive will be Intel x86, AMD64, PowerPC and IA-64." Actually, the story says clearly that this is only a proposal at this point, but it's definitely something to watch.
Is it April the 1st already?
"Affected Admins Propose Dropping Debian"
Seeing as they're the major systems out there. But IA-64? I've barely heard of that, and TFA says Microsoft dropped XP for that. Can anyone elaborate as to why this one was kept?
Obligatory Soundbite Catchphrase
so i won't have debian in my toaster????
well, I can still be using NetBSD. Of course the toaster runs it!
That might really hurt embedded developers. Seems like embedded users would be far more likely to use Deb than IA-64 users.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
...there goes my handy Sparc server...
"We can confirm that Debian does *not* ship the version with the trojan horse. Our version predates it." [CA-2002-28]
Thanks a lot! This was about time, or else we would never get a new stable release. Lets just hope thats it gets further then just beeing an proposal...
When the altruistic geeks of open source talk of no longer supporting a processor, you know things have got to be bad. Sun needs help... now!!!
Man, when will people learn that one cannot beat Intel when it comes to R&D and their blitzkreg-like manufacturering of processors?
I mean, debian is the only distro that supports all the exotic architectures. If debian only supports the main architectures in futre, what then will the difference be between them and SuSE, Mandrake, Ubuntu and Gentoo for that matter?
In other news, the NetBSD team announced that they have successfully ported NetBSD to the abacus...
Slashdot's first reaction to VMware
I just managed to find some spare time to finish my Debian m68k install on my fellow Amiga 1000 and now they're going to drop support? Argh...
Can't wait to get my hands on the new, stable 2.2 kernel!
Oh, wait...
"Play is the only way the highest intelligence of humankind can unfold." -- Joseph Chilton Pearce
This isn't about the kernel, it's about the distro. Linux won't stop running on other systems, Debian's just not going to support them. Maintaining a distribution on so many architectures is a lot of work that doesn't yield a very high return, and dropping the less common ones is really a very smart move.
Bears don't normally eat things that talk and move backwards.
So the question becomes, who will bother supporting non-mainstream hardware? They are still functional machines for me...
While Linux is well known for being exteremly cross-platform, 99.9% of installs will be on one of those four architectures. It would make sense to concentrate solely on those four rather than adding support for every Amiga and 68XXX setup out there. Especially now with Debian becoming a very strong player in the linux server community (now that RedHat is concentrating mainly on paid contracts and has allowed Fedora Core to become bulky and buggy.)
Besides, if you really want to run *nix on your Atari go download NetBSD.
- Cary
--Fairfax Underground: Where Fairfax County comes out to play
Original email
.. They will still have support for the other architectures, but seem to imply it must meet certain criteria to be considered for release.
They seem to imply it is a proposal to drop the actual releasing after sarge
IMHO: requiring a level of 98% is too high and only releasing if you can still buy is rediculous. Debian still mostly compiles for 386(on x86) and it's hard to buy a 386 these days.
I'm not sure how developers and users of the possible unsupported architectures would feel. I'd imagine that they would be pretty upset. There's no reason why they couldn't continue working on their respective platforms on their own, and have whatever release cycle they would like. I've seen an i586 Debian project, but I don't know how successful it is. I also know Slackware recently picked up S/390 support, and Gentoo has a wide range of architectures that it supports. Switching flavors always seems like another possible option.
The few machines sold hardly matters. HP 'claims" they will sppnd $3B on IA64 over next 5 years surely they can afford to pay for Linux on this dud of a processor.
Or better still pay the Debian guys
Help fight continental drift.
(In the second place, if there's a bug in the software, there's a bug and the sooner it is exposed and fixed, the better.)
Sure, Debian can test, et al, on some fixed set of boxes and "validate" their distro for them. But how hard would it be to then cross-compile for all the other platforms? They just need to say that those aren't verified. People would be fine with that. Well, more fine than being dumped altogether.
Let the user community decide if those lines need better verification, by providing it themselves. But you need a platform to verify, first!
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
As an active Debian developer, I simply want to state: this is anything but final and not at all decided. I am only one of many developers against the proposed scheme, and especially against the way in which the scheme was devised -- in a closed meeting with only a few select members, and completely without soliciting any input from the community.
In the long run, Debian may well have to concentrate more on some architectures than others, but a radical step such as the one proposed will probably not fly well with the community. Since our users are our top priority, you can expect many more emails on the topic before anything will happen.
echo mailto: !#^."<*>"|tr "<*> mailto:" net@madduck
Well, I'm sure Debian has their reasons, but I suspect they're suffering due to some of their fans dropping it for other distros. Late releases, stupid politics and aged packages isn't doing this distro any justice.
As for their decision to drop SPARC, good.. I ran Debian on my SPARC boxes for a few years, and it was garbage. Slow, clumsy and at times a few bad packages got in causing problems. Debian for SPARC made Solaris look like a rocket ship.
For all you SPARC users, switch to Gentoo (Running it and loving it) or support one of the other SPARC distros like Splack (Slackware-based SPARC distro).
I don't know if English is your mother tongue, but "Among the reasons SITED for doing this ..." is ugly. the correct word is CITED.
It's called Ubuntu.
PowerPC is stuck with a crappy old pre-NPTL glibc
because of the feature freeze. Making PowerPC be
unofficial would allow this to get fixed.
Heck, drop every port but x86. It's not nice how
the x86 port drags around the others by the
release cycle.
I thought not.
Will dropping support for other than the four major platforms (if it's done) split the Debian developers into two or more groups, one developing Debian for the major platforms and the other(s) specializing on some other platform, for example ARM?
the coffee can sized exhaust tip crowd for one thing.
is that only those 4 archs will be actively supported in Debian _releases_. Other architectures will still exist and maintained but not be included in the shifts from unstable->testing->stable.
If it's that it might be a good things, granting the more popular(?) architectures a smaller turnaround time for stable releases.
Or maybe hell freezes over.
Perhaps Debian isn't trying to address the embedded segment.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
This is one of the strangest moves in my opinion. What other choice do I have for running linux on MIPS?
'a more limber release process' and ultimately a ('hopefully') shorter release cyle.
You mean like Gentoo? And they still support Sparc.
an ill wind that blows no good
Not at all. The IA-64 is Intel's Itanium architecture which was massively redesigned. It is not compatable at all with x86 or AMD64 and is actually closer to the PowerPC, as both are RISC chips. The Itanium hasn't done very well (IBM just stopped selling it for their own POWER arch) but it it still used, and probably is at least #4 on servers.
This post written under Gentoo-linux with an SCO IP license.
So much for running Linux on Bubba the Big Mouth Bass. That was my dedicated firewall too!
The Peanut Gallery, Ubergeek, Biblically Sober
NCAAbbs.com: Thousands of fans, Hundreds of teams, Just one place
What thought process led to IA64 being favored over the various flavors of sparc?!? It probably involved a lot of vodka.
The main architectures to survive will be Intel x86, AMD64, PowerPC and IA-64.
I applaud Debian for realizing it's not worth wasting time on platforms with a total user population of less than a BOF meeting at the local community college. On the other hand, what the hell is Itanic doing on the list?
If it significantly improves the Debian release cycle, yes.
If it were the other way round, you'd hear them praising themselves on how Linux is great as it's available on all platforms.
Umm, it still would be avaiable on so many platforms. Debian is just one distribution. I'm sure there will be people who will maintain a Debian-like system for all the existing archs. All they have to do is rebuild the packages and maintain an installer for the architecture in question. They just won't be officially "Debian." But thanks for Trolling.
-matthew
"THERE IS NO JUSTICE, THERE IS ONLY ME." -Death
Having to have the installer, particularly, ready and tested across every single architecture is a major reason for delayed Debian releases. So are release-critical bugs in a particular architecture. As one of the vast majority of Debian users who use x86 (actually now just switched to AMD64, which will become more important over time), it seems silly to wait months for a release because the bloody Motorola 68000 series port (to pick a hypothetical example) can't fix their bloody boot disks.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
Debian is losing relevance to distributions like Ubuntu and Gentoo. They should definitely split into something like 'Debian-mainstream' and 'Debian-exotic' and let the two camps maintain their own release cycles, otherwise they're liable to fade aware into Slackware-dom.
Welcome to the world of continuous improvement, a la Gentoo.
I've never understood why the kernel can't be seperated from the distribution. If all applications were written on top of a platform like java or php or whatever, couldn't the kernel come from anywhere and if there was support for the application platform apps would run?
The man who trades freedom for security does not deserve nor will he ever receive either. - Benjamin Franklin
I first read that as "Debian Release Mgr. Proposes Dropping Some Acid"
Okay, so a philosopher, a philologist, and a philatelist walk into a bar...
Uh, the problem is not that there aren't any volunteers to maintain a full architecture repo. It is that the amount of effort for the low-level core stuff (installer, kernel, etc...) is very high since that is where all the differences are. It doesn't need people to work on a port, but a way of keeping all those low-level bits working roughly the same on all the official arches. I think most of the problem is that the linus kernel does not maintain consistency across arches. That is where the problem lies.
IMHO, the next best solution is to do an installer and well managed kernel for PPC, i386 and amd64, and release bootable cd images for all the other arches that you run debootstrap from as and when, and install your own kernel on the created system, but the rest of the packages are maintained for all the distro's in a similar fashion. Most packages require very little effort to make them work on all arches if you can make them work on four.
Gentoo supports at least as many architectures as Debian. A cursory glance at packages.gentoo.org will tell you that.
LOAD "SIG",8,1
wtf?
Someone at Debian is finally getting a fucking clue. I've been telling stupid Debian zealots this for years... your distro is dying because everything has to move in lockstep.
Interesting, from where I am it seems to be pretty much alive, thank you.
Take a look at the Linux kernel -- it's x86, and yet there are loads of ports which move at their own speed. Debian is a slug of a distro because it moves at the speed of the absolutely *LEAST* developed port.
There is always sid.
Split them off focus on the x86 distro... and let the other catch up or die off.
And then the only thing that sets Debian apart from the other distros (quality, determined by lots of portability issues spotted, bad code spotted this way, lots of different archs using the same distro, etc. will be dead. People will just use Ubuntu, if they want to use something x86-ppc only.
Debian is smothering... and all the puffed up insane zealotry about how other platforms are supported just as well as x86 is worthless if your distro is 5 years out of date.
Interesting, I run Debian, with kde 3.4 over kernel 2.6.10 and my distro does not feel 5 years out of date.
It's better to be the foot on the boot than the face on the pavement. ~~ tkx Kadin2048
Why bother keeping IA-64? Debian has more alpha users than ia64. There are more SPARC users. Heck, there are even more HPPA users than ia64 users. All the details are available at the Debian Popularity Contest.
Linux: you've lost your mind
BSD: you've lost your mind and your soul
Thus, Linux is the better deal. You get all the
features, without the eternal damnation.
If your toaster runs on one of the supported architectures, you can still install Debian, even if the proposed policy change is implemented.
These *are* just glorified elevator controller chips we're talking about, you know. Just think of all those gazillions of poor unsung 1970s chips that are still pulling duty in the windowless corners of refuse-to-die hardware.
It's just a singular thing to think back once and a while to how it all got started. (calculi, cuneiform, Pascal, Babbage, Lovelace, Turing, Hopper, Mauchly, Torvalds...)
Roughly,
Intel 4004->8086->IA-32
Motorola 6502->61080->PowerPC
"The more they overthink the plumbing,
the easier it is to stop up the drain."
-- Scotty, in "Star Trek III: The Seach for Spock"
The phrase "dropping support" is misleading. They're dropping the "stable" release for these archs. They are moved into a category called "second class citizen" architectures.
"unstable" -- which is what hacker-type individuals tend to run anyway (and is both much more up-to-date and not particularly unstable) -- will continue for all. As most of the affected archs fall into the "mostly for hackers" category, this change should have little real impact. I suppose the exception might be the sparc.
The benefit of all this is (besides, maybe, faster releases) that they have a plan for adding new scc archs easily.
[I think the "scc" archs will also not use the Debian mirror network, but probably don't have enough users to receive any real benefit from it either.]
We live, as we dream -- alone....
Debian will continue supporting the rest of the architectures... but only in the unstable tree.
All the users running rare platforms can continue using debian, and upgrading their distribution, but they won't have a stable release.
I think this is the way to go...
Mgr. Proposes Dropping Some Archs
:-)
That's good. Fewer trips to McDonald's will result in a healther staff.
Coder's Stone: The programming language quick ref for iPad
Stick Men
I've always felt that one _major_ factor in Debian's ridiculously long release cycles was supporting lesser-used architectures. Glad someone up the food chain feels the same way.
Nosce Te Ipsum
Instead of fixing this, the developers waste effort on a 32-bit userspace that requires a 64-bit processor. Now, you might wonder why. They claim that 64-bit is slow, pointing to a brain-damaged ABI they like to use. AFAIK it involves function descriptors, like the Itanic ABI and the known-dysfunctional ppc64 ABI. The obvious thing would be to design a new ABI, similar to the one used for the Alpha, perhaps with a thread-local register added to modernize things a bit.
(and yes, the simplicity and beauty of a no-nonsense pure 64-bit system justifies the insignificant bloat, plus it is future-proof)
Ugh. It appears that NetBSD isn't even trying to be 64-bit on MIPS. I hope I'm mistaken, but it looks like NetBSD is even worse than Linux.
Rather than believing this silly FUD, why not read the actual annoucement by Steve Langasek, which explicitly states that support WILL NOT be dropped.
5 /03/msg00012.html
http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/200
if you took a quick glance at the gentoo.org site you'd see that Gentoo supports pretty much the same archs as Debian
embedded developers really need a completely separate distribution from a mainstream desktop/server one like debian.
something like an arm/68k(coldfire)/etc embedded distribution would be more beneficial to embedded development in general. something built from the ground up around diet libc etc for example, ditching X11 and everything else useless for embedded systems. taking framebuffer development to the next level etc.
embedded architectures hold back debian, and debian holds back embedded architectures. forking would be beneficial to both.
http//www.netbsd.org/
Just what I need, a bunch MORE telemarketers calling my house. Telemarketers make Jeff mad. Jeff smash!
bloodclotjungletekno
Although apt is great, the Debian Policy Manual is what makes apt (and everything else on Debian) Just Work(TM). Apt and various other dependency management tools are available for other distributions, but without a consistently applied policy no automatic tool can work the miracles that Debian's apt can.
Figures. I just got an SGI O2. Dammit.
--saint
I am puzzled why would they support Itanium and not support SPARC. You might have your political ideas about Sun, but the fact still is that SPARC is many times more poplular CPU than Itanium. In fact, I'd go as far as to state that Itanium is, for all intents and purposes, stillborn. SPARC, on the other hand, seems to have some juice in it, expecially with Niagara and the more advanced Fujitsu cores.
/me shakes head in disbelief
I don't see logic in such choice. I mean, even for testing: most everyone has a SPARC-based workstation laying around, while only a handful possess an Itanium-based anything. It must be easier to develop for and test SPARC-based builds.
Sigged!
No loss there. -Llama
Oh, sorry... :-)
It's better to be the foot on the boot than the face on the pavement. ~~ tkx Kadin2048
I'd be perfectly willing for most archs to be dropped for release considerations. In all practicality, greater than 90% of the people using Debian won't be using anything beyond the 4 archs.
This proposal is natually very release oriented. There're so many different systems supported by Debian it's damn near impossible to reduce the RC bug count accross all of them to be able to release. Ignoring RC bugs on all but the four main purely for release purposes would really help the rest of us out. Anybody installing Debian on m68k or alpha just flat out needs to buy a new computer, and anybody installing on Arm will probably be better suited by LFS instead. Very few people will be running a production server on mips, mipsel, or sparc (although, sparc more than the other two). Which only leaves s390, the platform with the weakest Debian support, and they've probably already been told by their boss to run Red Hat anyway, and if they haven't and do in fact get the luxury of running Debian on s390 probably aren't going to be too perturbed with not using an officially supported platform (since I don't think they complain too loudly now anyway).
So I'd like to keep them all around as unoffically supported, but yea for the sake of releasing on 4 platforms I don't mind dropping the others.
If everything was well-written and accounted for differing word lengths, byte orders, etc. then we wouldn't be having this conversation. Unfortunately, that's not the case. On the plus side, Debian's dedication to platform equality means that a lot of bugs get exposed (and fixed) that no one would ever know about if the world only ran x86. This is a good thing for everyone, even those where that software already worked as expected.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
So you're going to write a C compiler in PHP or Java that compiles to PHP or Java? Write emacs in Java? Write the half million other programs out there in Java?
Oh, and you're going to write the Java runtime in Java? What was the point of this again?
It's Konsole.
emt 377 emt 4
Even the trolls can't be bothered to read the damned thing. Debian will still be available on all those plaforms, but Debian Stable won't be after Sarge releases.
If this proposal passes.
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
> Late releases, stupid politics and aged packages
> isn't doing this distro any justice.
probably the ONLY way that debian will ever get timely releases is to switch to "releasing" *ONLY* a small set of core packages, i.e. the debian base system. that could easily be tested and released for any number of platforms on a six-monthly cycle.
all other packages would be available in "unstable" or "testing", either downloadable on the net or included as a snapshot on the install CDs - so you could download or buy (from a third party CD vendor) a debian release CD with no extras, or with your choice of either "testing" or "unstable" snapshot as of the day of release.
and, since the testing/unstable "extras" would be separate CD images from the stable core release, you could buy/download freshly generated snapshot releases of them every day of the year.
and, for those who really like the long-term constancy that "stable" has to offer, there's no reason why the current slow and steady release method could not be continued to produce a stable full release...once every two or three years as now. or maybe slightly more often since the core system would be getting upgraded and tested more frequently, and more end-users would be using and testing either testing or unstable.
we could call that slow release cycle the "conservative server release" rather than "stable".
Debian runs pretty well as the Familiar distro for iPaqs, on the ARM platform. It's that kind of cross-platform support that makes Linux so interesting, and keeps the embedded platforms such exciting targets for development: recompile apps developed by such a large, general-purpose community. Embedded apps are a much more exciting platform for developers, because of the huger market and wide-open opportunities as it gets started. Debian, don't blow it!
--
make install -not war
This has been floating around the debian-sparc mailing list all day... there seems to be quite a few pissed off users...
I suppose that if the Debian devels are pig headed enough to have a meeting like this without inviting anyone from the sparc community, it really says something about what users they care about.
I've been saying for years that Debian/GNU is _the_ Server OS. A look at the proposed Arch support would leave one to believe that they want to re-vector themselves as _the_ desktop os.
The slow and steady release schedule that debian has stuck to is great for server and other enterprise uses but does leave a bit to be desired for the desktop, look at the void being filled by ubuntu, progeny and mepis on the desktop.
I suppose I knew this day was coming, #gentoo-sparc currently is a better source of tech support than #debian-sparc is on freenode....
I really didnt want to switch to gentoo, but unless I want to go the BSD route that seems to be the only viable option.
Can someone send me a 4x5" gentoo sticker that I can use to cover the red swirl sticker on my truck?
Words are only yours until someone else uses them...
What I'm trying to point out that the situation described in my previous post is actually what has happened in just about every Debian release cycle (for different values of "boot floppies" and "68000 series"). The present situation *is* silly.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
I'd like to install it too?
As an embedded linux developer (who has worked on both ARM and MIPS), I can tell you that for a production, shipping system, it doesn't matter. You'll almost always end up rolling together your own thing. However, when a vendor (e.g. Cirrus Logic) has an evaluation board (e.g., EDB9315) that comes with a hard drive with Debian loaded on it and you can see that X11 works with the framebuffer driver and USB keyboards and mice work and network apps work, it's very impressive. Most imporantly though it verifies that the drivers (framebuffer, usb, ide, serial, network, pcmcia, CF, et cetera) are implemented in a standard way and will work with "off the shelf" linux apps. This makes things amazingly easier than with other companies whose linux ports are not as complete or functional. And if you're a small company doing an embedded Linux project, it's much better to go with a System-on-Chip processor from a vendor that provides a good Linux port and good Linux drivers than it is to either do your own or write your own drivers.
However, it is sometimes very useful to use a full system like this to do native compiles of your applications (instead of cross-compiling) and native debugging. Of course, when you move to your custom hardware, you usually have to drop all that nice stuff.
(By the way, I am really a big fan of the Cirrus Logic 93xx series system-on-chip processors. After working on two other ARM SoC systems and one MIPS system, the Cirrus 9315 was by far the best supported.)
My other first post is car post.
Always do right. This will gratify some people and astonish the rest. -- Mark Twain
Hey, if you guys would just read the actual announcement from Steve: http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2005 /03/msg00012.html
You would see that support is NOT being dropped. Rather, the proposal just allows the common architectures to be released before the uncommon ones are fully tested. This seems like an excellent plan, rather than having to wait forever for Debian releases.
- x86_64 (64 bit) & i686 (32 bit) because of the best Turion, Opteron & Athlon64.
- i686 (32 bit) because of the best Pentium-M & Xeon P4 EE.
- PowerPC 970MP (64 bit)(aka G5) because of their powerful floating operations, RISC & 64 bit supercomputers!.
- PowerPC (32 bit)(aka G4/G3) because of their powerful floating operations & RISC!.
NO IA-64 because it's the slowest & unstable Titanic running at 900 MHz.open4free ©
I see from the list of ports that they include only one MIPSs port, while Debian includes two: "mips" and "mipsel" (little endian). They are binary incompatible and run on entirely different hardware. Big-endian MIPS runs on SGIs and such while little-endian MIPS runs on Decstations and such.
I don't know which Gentoo has, but it doesn't have both.
-molo
Using your sig line to advertise for friends is lame.
The better solution for 100,000,000 Debianans is to remove IA-64 from our efforts!!!
open4free ©
Uhhhh. Your check's in the mail.
"A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming, is not worth knowing" - Alan Perlis
How are we gonna survive without Debian distros for arcane architetcures that no one has ever seen or used in a production environment???!!! This is truly another Black Monday...
I've got an old sparc classic running a load of woody that was installed in June of `01. It runs great for a 50MHz sun4m with 72MB of ram that is up 24/7. I suppose I will still be happy with it if it caught on fire and didn't unmount my filesystems before powering off. Thanks to Debian I have had several years of enjoyment out of a machine that was not at all enjoyable previous to becoming a penguin.
If rajr bites the dust, he will likely be replaced by a newer, faster, x86. I would be compelled to run something newer than woody on this machine.
So I will be moving on to something more mainstream in my little home user world. I think this bears some resemblence to what is happening in the business world in terms of replacing older, not-so-common hardware and software(where applicable).
Whatever happens I'll (thankfully) still be able to enjoy free software.
-Bill
Bugs that are not apparent under the operating conditions of one platform become very apparent under those of another, for one thing. Also, different timings present in different hardware can uncover the strange situations that result from erroneous multitasking programming. Infrequent intermittant problems become more noticeable, and therefore get fixed.
I hope Debian doesn't choose to drop other architectures.
OpenBSD hasn't dropped VAX yet, so the Alpha version will be supported for a while and machines where you can actually buy new ones like HP-PA and SPARC will be supported long after we're all dead.
I rarely criticize things I don't care about.
I guess this means that RISC will lose support.
I can almost see SPARC, but I would think that ARM would still be a highly potential platform for development.
However, it should be pointed out that these other Architectures are not being dropped from the development tree, just not being held to the same release cycle as the primary four mentioned in the article.
I suppose it is inevitable, but I would have taken a different approach. Like drop the worse four of the bunch and then see what effect that has on the remaining Architectures and the effect it has, if any, on the hardware.
For a minute there I was worried that they dropped the Apple, that would be catastrophic.
The NetBSD Project should drop some archs, too.
Sure, in some cases the NetBSD port works fine but the quality isn't the best (for example: netbsd/macppc port).
quality > quantity
Just my opinion.
why they are doing it - but please keep sparc - my work won't buy me another admin workstation and I have a sunblade 100 and debian runs a heck of a lot faster than any version of solaris I had on it mainly solaris 8 and 9. and all the software works like it is suppose to - not some screwed up gnome version sun thinks coporations need.
had a coworker try solaris 10 and now he is bugging management for more memory so 10 is just as bad as 8 or 9.
so pleeeeeeease don't drop sparc.
...so Debian developers can stop arguing and thinking they all have the same skill sets and rights?
Yeah, and do you l00z3rs realize there are too many people in Debian that aren't really developers? They just *think* they are, I mean compare the type of developement they do with all the BSD guys. BSD people hack kernel and protocols. Debian? What do they do, but take huge pride in loosing deadlines and being sluggish?
Interesting that Debian calls it AMD64. Even the kernel calls it x86_64 (ia64 referrs to Itanium). Granted, AMD *DID* come up with the instruction set and all...
*Condense fact from the vapor of nuance*
I've installed and ran debian on x86 (desktop/server/laptop), mips (sgi), and PA-risc (both 32 and 64 bit). I almost always go with unstable, and it seams robust and.....well....."stable" enough for me. Packages work 99.9% of the time. Droping stable support for non-x86 archs might not be a bad idea. A descision like this could free up reasorces and speed up debian development, hopefully including porting! I say this as someone who basically hates x86; I have several sparc systems I'm setting up right now and vow to never buy intel again. Debian developers should focus on a more agressive development cycle (if anyones working on debian needs a shell for testing on obscure hardware or wants me to try compiling something, you can contract me
aim:Da1the0ne or
the_oneREMOVE_SPAM_OBFUSCATOR@ameritech.net
------ Take away the right to say fuck and you take away the right to say fuck the government.
If debian is "proposing" to drop support for some architectures, I wouldn't worry about anything happening for a good long time. Hell, they've been "planning" on releasing Sarge for literally years now. By the time this can possibly go from proposal -> plan -> reality, your crusty old Alpha or SPARC will probably have given up the ghost anyway.
Sad but true.
...it will be the road to the Penguins death...
Actually, RedHat does support SPARC through Aurora Linux, which is on track to merge with Fedora. Its latest release has most of Core 2 and the next ISOs will be Core 3.
How about Aurora Linux? Works great on SPARC32 up to the latest 64 bit stuff. I use it on two SPARCStation 20's (SMP), three Ultra 2's and a bunch of Ultra 5's and Ultra 10's, along with a Blade 1000.
Version 1.9x is very Fedora-ish.
This is exactly the kind of testing that helps insure you don't have a bunch of Undefined Behavior in the packages you deliver.
I think this testing was a large reason why Debian Stable (in the slowly changing sense) was as Stable (in the never crashing sense) as it was.
I think you meant to say "...but it is still used, and probably is on at least #4 servers."
Well, not just the kernel, unless you are proposing putting a JAVA interpreter in the kernel... You'd also need that interpreter native to each arch.
Then, unless the interpreters are very tiny, you probably also want a large number of apps (such as fsck) running natively, as well.
Then, even though the apps are interpreted, and don't need to be recompiled for every arch, there will be differences from architecture to architecture, which will require fixing numerous bugs, and take just as much effort as porting C programs does now...
I think you are forgetting that C is portable. It's portable at a slightly lower level, in that it has to be COMPILED on every target, but other than that, C is just as portable as JAVA, and all the problems they have with C apps across different architectures, they'd also have with java apps across different architectures.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
from original email:
...
:) btw.. a wbel built from v4 is not that far off... it's building successfully, so it's probably down to clensing the rh marks off and packaging it up...
Also, since the original purpose of the SCC proposal was to reduce the size
of the archive that mirrors had to carry,
wtf? drives are cheap. how big the complete archive happens to be is completely irrelevent.
just because TPTB can't light a fire under the maintainers of the odd-ball architectures to get moving towards release...... no excuse to completely abandon the biggest difference between debian/gnu and everything else linux: it runs on (virtually) everything.
drop to less than a handful of platforms, shrink the release cycle, and what do you get? fedora core without the graphical installer. but then, the whole idea of the new d-i was to have the same installer for the oddballs as for x86, and make it easier to develop and maintain it... what's the friggin point now? all that work shot to hell when they could've just ported anaconda and turned out "fedora clone 3.1" instead)
i think debian should stretch out the stable release schedule to THREE YEARS (or more), not shorten it to half that or less... that's the other great thing about debian, the loooooooong release cycle. "stable" should be the totally free competitor to RHEL, while "testing" can be the equiv of a fedora, suse, mandrake, etc...
i'd much rather install one debian than say, buy suse at 90 bucks and then upgrade it two or three times at 60 bucks a crack in the same amount of time.... that kind of release cycle really blows to hell the cost-of-ownership arguments vs windows, at least on the desktop.
ya, you could always reinstall or upgrade debian that two or three times too... but that's a lot of work and introduces more problems (the idea of 'stable' is that it's STABLE..... they might as well drop the "stable" name and call releases SID instead.. sheesh)...
hmmm.. i saw that a new release of whitebox enterprise linux http://www.whiteboxlinux.org/ is available... built from RHEL sources, it'll at least have a shelf life suitable for a server..... and being a (funded) one-man show, there's no ugly politics to get in the way either...
a sad fucking day indeed
Debian has a choice of netbsd, linux or hurd kernels. The platform applications are written for is "debian", i.e. the debian filesystem layout and base system. C applications which interface with the kernel still need recompiling though, of course, and there are a lot of C applications around which aren't going to be moved to java any time soon. Plus if the executable format is different, e.g. 32/64 bits or endianness, then obviously everything needs recompiling if you're going to take advantage of that.
I am trolling
Most of the smaller distros out there are really Debian with a bunch of stuff stripped out and replaced with Busybox and whatever tools make sense for the target environment (security, system repair, media players, etc.) A few of them are more minimal roll-your-owns, and the embedded world also has the uCLinux crowd and vendors like MonteVista, but there's a huge amount of Debian usage in the small/medium appliance world.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Embedded devices are getting pretty powerful. 256MB is not outside the storage range in the near future.
Find a job you like and you will never work a day in your life.
Maybe it would make sense to have different types of Debian GNU/Linux for tiny devices, desktops and servers.
After all, it makes as little sense to have KDevelop running on m68k as having a Gaim package for s390.
http://www.dieblinkenlights.com
I would be a victim of that decision - I run Debian on my Amiga3000 just for the fun - but I still say "go for it".
That proposal aims for stable releases. I see no problem seeing an unstable m68k debian popping up after some time. Right now even the stable m68k-Debian is a rotting piece of shit not working at all so why bother with stable at all?
"Life is short and in most cases it ends with death." Sir Sinclair
This is a well known fact, food does influence taste of semen it seems.
My question; what foods makes your sperm go taste like gummy bears? or just sweet in general?.
Cheers! ;)
ps. My gf madly diggs gummybears
No worries then.... we'll all be playing Duke Nukem Forever long before that happens
And for the record, I do run debian on all my boxes.... sid, of course
It's my understanding that Intel will not be continuing the IA-64 line as they finally admitted, due to a combination of poor marketing and/or architechture, that the platform isn't viable (and, imho, the overwhelming supiriority of the Opteron platform versus IS-64 or Xeon). Yet Debian is earmarking this as a "keeper" when they're trimming some fat? Odd. And what about the cage-rattling I heard not long ago about a "Debianized" verison of Open Solaris? Guess that's died before being born?
Hey, I've no problems with give and take and a "show me" philosophy. That's how things get done. It's the ones who want bread from heaven and then argue that it's buttered on the wrong side that bother me.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Even NT/XP can be installed with FAI.
It's better to be the foot on the boot than the face on the pavement. ~~ tkx Kadin2048