Distribution quote of the week [LWN.net]

However, if there is another distro out there with better hppa/sparc support then it is actually a good thing if those users dump Gentoo and switch to the other distro. These are extremely niche arches at this point, so having 10 people on the planet on one distro is going to work better than having them all on different distros.

However, you can't really expect the ubuntu experience if you're running one of these architectures.

— Rich Freeman

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Distribution quote of the week

Posted Sep 9, 2017 9:20 UTC (Sat) by glaubitz (subscriber, #96452) [Link] (4 responses)

The distribution in question is Debian, see:

> https://cdimage.debian.org/cdimage/ports/

Distribution quote of the week

Posted Sep 14, 2017 11:01 UTC (Thu) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link] (3 responses)

Not that I'm running any of those weird architectures, but if I was ...

I run gentoo, and can't stand deb-based distros. What am I supposed to do :-)

(Every time I've tried to run something that uses deb, it's sent me running screaming back to slack, suse, or gentoo :-)

Cheers,
Wol

Distribution quote of the week

Posted Sep 14, 2017 11:14 UTC (Thu) by glaubitz (subscriber, #96452) [Link] (2 responses)

> I run gentoo, and can't stand deb-based distros. What am I supposed to do :-)

Well, then you're out of luck if you want to use Linux on a big SPARC machine, for example, (i.e. SPARC M7) and want to use Gentoo.

I merely mentioned that Debian has very good support for these obscure architectures and that users have an option if Gentoo drops them.

That's all. No one really forces you to use anything.

Distribution quote of the week

Posted Sep 14, 2017 12:14 UTC (Thu) by anselm (subscriber, #2796) [Link] (1 responses)

I suppose that to many people, when the alternative is single-handedly maintaining a Gentoo port for big SPARC machines, Debian will eventually not look so bad anymore.

Distribution quote of the week

Posted Sep 14, 2017 12:42 UTC (Thu) by glaubitz (subscriber, #96452) [Link]

Yep, well said. I fully agree.

Plus, Debian actually maintains a sparc64 port, i.e. a full 64-bit SPARC port unlike Gentoo which is still stuck at 32-Bit SPARC.

For hppa (PA-RISC), the Debian port is actually maintained by the two people who also are the main upstream developers left for PA-RISC (kernel, toolchain and so on).

And, most importantly, since Debian actually builds all packages on the buildds, one can actually be sure whether a package is available on a given obscure architecture or not. In the past, I made the experience that on obscure architectures like SuperH, it's not guaranteed that gcc will actually work as well as it does on x86_64.