Two things from this thread: 1) It was a simple enough request and reasonable in my opinion. I'm also glad that he was willing to ask in the first place because as some say, when you don't ask the answer is already no anyways, so why not ask?
2) I understand though why the other side sees his request as a bit outrageous from a user base and upstream support, perspective (among other reasons). In most cases, I'd agree that those are the perfect metrics to measure one's decision on for these kinds of matters in almost all cases. On the other hand, I see M68K (both the new and old hardware) as an important architecture to keep around for 1) keeping a wide variety of CPU architectures available for learning, understanding, and diversity and 2) historical purposes (although this is obviously the much weaker argument from a developer support standpoint -- I'd totally agree with that). I'm also sad to hear about the fate of mips(eb). :( 3) It's clear everyone in this thread is passionate about Debian, free software, and in Adrian's case, passionate about keeping the unofficial M68K port alive. This passion from everyone is certainly contagious. So kudos to all of you. I hope Debian will reconsider providing at least a small part of the funding and I'm positive the hobbyist community around M68K (as well as other avenues) can come together for the rest. I believe by doing so, it would show Debian doing things that prove itself as "the universal operating system." I appreciate reading everyone's input regardless. I'll understand if Debian still maintains it's decision to not approve such funding (although I would certainly be disappointed). Thanks, Brock On Sun, Sep 29, 2019 at 8:54 AM Aron Xu <a...@debian.org> wrote: > On Sun, Sep 29, 2019 at 7:58 PM John Paul Adrian Glaubitz > <glaub...@physik.fu-berlin.de> wrote: > > > > > Regardless, I think you have your answer. > > > Absent the appearance of significant new support, there is not > > > sufficient interest in spending Debian funds on m68k gcc development. > > > > I don't think we have heard enough voices yet to be able to answer that > > question. > > > > Such work should indeed be funded by really interested parties, i.e. > hardware vendors and their ecosystem partners. I'm not saying > volunteers is out of the game, but look at mips(eb), we have retired > the architecture entirely because we are not able to find enough > investment on hardware and manpower to maintain it well, even if > hardware is still easy to purchase, toolchain/kernel support is > current. > > It could be a better idea to get more interested people to fund such > work, but I don't see enough motivation to spend Debian money for a > port that nobody else have interest in supporting its toolchain. > > Regards, > Aron > >
