[Sussex] Debian news...

[Geoffrey J. Teale]

Steve Dobson <steve at dobson.org> writes:

> 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.

Well, pretty much it's a combination of both of those factors and that
maintaining those (very obscure) architectures has become a stumbling
block in the road to a better compiler.  The phrase RISC CPU's above
was misguided.  I've reread the release notes and to be clear GCC4
drops support for the following chips:

    * Intel i860
    * Ubicom IP2022
    * National Semiconductor NS32K
    * Texas Instruments TMS320C[34]x
    * SPARC family
          o SPARClite-based systems (sparclite-*-coff, sparclite-*-elf, sparc86x-*-elf)
          o OpenBSD 32-bit (sparc-*-openbsd*)

Which seems fairly unlikely to hit most peoples freedoms.  Of course
if you need support for those things you can always continue to use
(and even maintain) GCC 3 - which is what Free Software is all about.

> 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.

I see you preempted me :-)

> 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. 

No it's not about commerce or finance, it's about delivering a better
compiler.  They're also not taking away GCC3 so in the unlikely case
you need it then you can use it.

------- %< ----------
> 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.

Sure...  OpenBSD is probably best for the way I use that box anyway.

-- 
Geoff Teale
CMed Technology            -   gteale at cmedresearch.com
Free Software Foundation   -   tealeg at member.fsf.org