Thomas Steffen <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
> On 7/5/05, David Wood <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>> On Tue, 5 Jul 2005, Adam Stiles wrote:
>>
>> > Binary compatibility is irrelevant at best {every Linux machine already
>> > has a
>> > compiler installed} and harmful at worst {Windows has wide-scale binary
>> > compatibility -- and rampant malware}.
>
> That is the theory, and I do believe in theory... until something more
> practical comes along. I use Openoffice, Acrobat Reader, Partimage,
> Mplayer, a bit of Wine, Oracle and sometimes Matlab for Linux. That
> makes seven applications that are not supported on pure-amd64. To the
> average user, running or not running seven applications is *way* more
> important than your theory. In fact, the average user is probably
> better off with a 32bit system, until he/she has 4 GB of memory.
Hmm, I use Acrobat Reader, Mplayer and a bit of Wine on my
pure64. What problems do you have?
>> 1) We don't care about anything that's not free software. (This is already
>> too much for most people, but let's say that's no problem...)
>
> Yep, that is the Debian stance. And Debian constantly redefines what
> counts as free software, which means you can suddenly be out in the
> rain.
>
>> 2) We believe that C/C++ is usually magically portable across hardware
>> architectures.
>
> As programmer I have to say that it should be, if you apply the due
> care. However, it will never really work unless you actually test and
> debug it. BTW, gcc/gdb does not properly support 64bit on SPARC, just
> as a side note on "magically portable".
Not magically, but properly written it does. Writing portable code is
an artform less and less people seem to perform nowadays.
MfG
Goswin
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