Hi Yavor! On Wed, Mar 17, 2010 at 03:49:16PM +0200, Yavor Doganov wrote: > This asset is not something to be proud of because of shallow > marketing reasons -- it benefits the whole Free World as many bugs are > uncovered, reported, and fixed, quite often by Debian people. It > would not be incorrect to say that, having in mind how many packages > are available in the archive, and the GNU/Hurd + GNU/kFreeBSD ports, > Debian is the most comprehensive testground of the GNU system.
Absolutely, it is one of our distinguishing values that we should cherish more than we currently do. FWIW, there is nothing wrong in using it _also_ for marketing reasons. In general, the kind of marketing based on our distinguishing features (and this is one of those) is our best chance to attract new contributors. > - m68k was the first "kicked out" arch. AFAICT, it is essentially > dead now and not even a miracle can save it. That is was kicked out by the current rules is true (actually, that is what it seemed to me as a DD non-porter, people like Wouter surely knows more than me about extra details, if any). What I don't share of this sentence is the feeling of causality it gives between being kicked out and then dying. I sure do not want to deny that a non-release arch is looked at by less eyes, and that the project in general cares less about it (e.g. as the bugs are not RC, they are less likely to be NMU-ed). But an architecture which is suffering anyhow---for instance no maintenance of the toolchain or no buildd admins for it---would not necessarily be any better supported for end users. Also, the process of arch qualification goes both ways, and the entrance of GNU/kFreeBSD as a new release arch is IMO evidence of that. In fact, if the above impression of causality were true, we would risk to be stuck to not having new archs in the future, which luckily is not true. Ultimately, I believe that when an "average" package (i.e. not a monster package) is properly maintained, the maintainer will be happy to apply patches that add support for an arch, even if it is not (yet) a release arch. You might argue that there are several average packages which are not properly maintained, but that's a whole different problem ... > * Support for old (and not only old) architectures cannot be infinite; > and there's a line to draw somewhere when it comes to a release. > * There should be an entitiy within the project to decide which arch > gets released and which not, which one is blocking the whole release <snip> > * There's not much a DPL could do except some publicity and > RFH-oriented efforts which are known not to work well... AOL I was thinking along the same lines while reading your post thus far, thanks for sparing me to write these :) > Porters are an extremely valuable resource, and the survival of an <snip> > Therefore, it is essential to preserve, and even grow, such > resources by doing all possible to attract people with sufficient > knowledge and also pass that knowledge through. Agreed. > What do you think the project should do (with or without or regardless > of your help as potential DPL) to preserve this goodness (maximum > supported architectures) for as long as possible? Do you think it is > "goodness" or you're in the "good riddance" camp? I'm surely on the goodness side. More generally, I'm for defending and advertising more all of Debian distinguishing features, and our range of supported archs is surely one of them. On the side of developers, ideally we should not accept maintenance behaviors in which patches that add support for non-release archs are regularly ignored, but that can hardly be imposed to people. Let's just aim for packages which are in a good maintenance status (more QA, as usual) and I believe that more reactivity to porters patches will come for free. On the side of porters, we cannot create them magically. All we can do is (1) do our best to attract them (because we know such rare entities do exist :-)) and then (2) put them in the best possible condition to do what they like. To improve their work condition I fear the DPL can do little more than ensuring our arch-specific machine park is up to par. To attract them, advertising arch support as I said above would be a wonderful start. Cheers. -- Stefano Zacchiroli -o- PhD in Computer Science \ PostDoc @ Univ. Paris 7 z...@{upsilon.cc,pps.jussieu.fr,debian.org} -<>- http://upsilon.cc/zack/ Dietro un grande uomo c'è ..| . |. Et ne m'en veux pas si je te tutoie sempre uno zaino ...........| ..: |.... Je dis tu à tous ceux que j'aime
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