Distribution quote of the week [LWN.net]

Distribution quote of the week

Posted Sep 14, 2017 12:14 UTC (Thu) by anselm (subscriber, #2796)
In reply to: Distribution quote of the week by glaubitz
Parent article: Distribution quote of the week

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.

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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.