[Sussex] Debian news...

[Steve Dobson]

Geoff, Colin, everyone

On Wed, 2005-05-04 at 09:14 +0100, Geoffrey J. Teale wrote:
> Colin Tuckley <colin at tuckley.org> writes:
> 
> > There has been discussion on the Debian lists about this. There is a
> > proposal to reduce the number of supported archs in the main release. The
> > problem is that only the main release is supported by security updates,
> > which would leave other sub-releases or whatever they get called with no
> > security updates and thus not usable for serious applications.
> 
> There will come a time when they'll pretty much have to drop some of
> the older RISC CPUs as GCC is dropping them in release 4.  However, I
> imagine Debian isn't going to be doing a gcc4 release for quite
> sometime yet.

Geoff: Do you know why older RISC CSUs are being dropped?  Is it because
they can't find working hardware on which to test, or is it because
those CPUs are not in common use?  The former is understandable, but if
it is the latter, then that is a really shame.  The FSF will be talking
away my freedom to use a paricular CPU.

Now I suppose that some might say that I am free to add support myself,
which it true.  But one of the strongest arguments for using high level
lanugages is that you get platform independance - they serperate you
from the underlying hardware.  I can develop software for any processor
for which I have a C/C++/... compiler.  I'm not an expert in either
compiler tecknology or any CPU, so to add support to GCC4 for a dropped
CPU I would have to re-train myself.

The FSF, by supportting CPU-x in GCC<=3, are taking away a freedom that
they gave me in the first place.  I'm not saying they don't have the
right to do that, and I accept that they may have to do this for
financal reasons.  I just think it goes against what the FSF stands for
it they are doing this for commerical/market type reasons. 

> I'd actually think it would be a real shame for Debian to support
> fewer architectures, it's one of the very few distros that has any
> level of support for minority Linux users.  That said it's also true
> that those other platforms haven't always been very well supported.
> 

I agree, for the reasons I gave above.

> Debian has never successfully installed on my Sun Ultra5, or rather the
> install disks have never booted successfully.  It's probably the case
> that I could have fiddled more or built a custom boot disk, but it was
> easier to install Gentoo at the time.  These days that box runs
> OpenBSD, which works very well on that machine and gives me a nice
> secure Apache install.

The best way to install such a system is with a network boot installer.
I had to do this for my MIPS box and it worked very well.

Steve