Woodruff: Weird architectures weren't supported to begin with

Posted Mar 2, 2021 10:53 UTC (Tue) by farnz (subscriber, #17727)
In reply to: Woodruff: Weird architectures weren't supported to begin with by pizza
Parent article: Woodruff: Weird architectures weren't supported to begin with

And also, a lot of the complaining is coming from people who haven't provided said free ride; the complainants talking about HPPA and S390 are literally complaining that it used to build on those architectures, but doesn't any more. I have a lot more time for the complaints about M68k support because (a) they're coming from people who actually used and bugfixed the software in past releases on M68k, and (b) they're actually working to find a way forward with Rust support for the platform.

If I flip the question round, it becomes clearer to me: what degree of effort does a project have to make to be compatible with platforms that are no longer properly updated? Are we choosing to limit ourselves to the versions of C and C++ that're supported by MIPSPro on IRIX because there are people who want to use it (there's a surprisingly vibrant IRIX hobbyist base), or are we going to say that you can use C99, C++11 and other more modern languages, and those platforms need to keep up or die off?

Woodruff: Weird architectures weren't supported to begin with

Posted Mar 2, 2021 15:38 UTC (Tue) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link] (2 responses)

> there's a surprisingly vibrant IRIX hobbyist base

Interesting. CMake dropped support for IRIX years ago (because we don't have anything to test with). Are they just using an old CMake version, only using software from that era, or doing everything with CMake-less projects (possible, but more likely a result of not updating software stacks I'd imagine)?

Woodruff: Weird architectures weren't supported to begin with

Posted Mar 3, 2021 9:14 UTC (Wed) by farnz (subscriber, #17727) [Link] (1 responses)

Mostly running period-appropriate software on them, and either fixing things locally or not using modern software.

The systems involved tend not to be internet-connected because of this - the risk of running IRIX 6.5 on today's Internet is not worth taking.

Woodruff: Weird architectures weren't supported to begin with

Posted Mar 4, 2021 22:22 UTC (Thu) by ejr (subscriber, #51652) [Link]

It wasn't worth taking that risk then, either. xauth + at boot...