Re: Raising the armel port baseline to armv5te
On 11/12/2017 05:44 PM, Adrian Bunk wrote:
> People using such exotic/ancient hardware tend to be non-average users,
> since they often have to debug and report issues noone else sees.
I don't really think those are non-average users. Many people just installed
their system once and keep updating it. If you change the baseline, you
will break this.
> And the target audience was big enough that I'd have expected people to
> speak up who would have seen ARMv4t-specific bug reports.
No, I really don't think so. Most people using Debian do not post to
the mailing lists. Otherwise people on the Debian subreddit on reddit
wouldn't ask questions about things that were changed in Debian years
ago.
> A working kernel recent enough for buster on hardware where running
> buster makes sense, and with actual users - this might simply no
> longer exist.
Why not? Again, armel currently covers over 12000 packages which build
fine. I don't see any pressure which makes the bump of the baseline
necessary. If people need something better, they can just use armhf.
You really don't gain anything with this change.
>> So, what are you actually expecting to gain with this bump? You will still be lacking native ARM support for most things.
>> ...
>
> We would gain confidence that the port works at the baseline.
>
> For all that I know, it is theoretically possible that the stretch gcc
> emits ARMv5 code and that thousands of packages in stretch are therefore
> broken. Or that some core library uses ARMv5 assembler code.
Have you seen a single bug report which proves this point?
> That's different from code that doesn't run on ARMv5 or uses SSE2 on
> i386 where I could immediately give you bug numbers for users reporting
> breakages caused by these baseline violations - such baseline violations
> do happen, and that's why it is important to have users who report them.
Yes, but none has been reported. Yet you feel confident that this is the case.
Adrian
--
.''`. John Paul Adrian Glaubitz
: :' : Debian Developer - glaubitz@debian.org
`. `' Freie Universitaet Berlin - glaubitz@physik.fu-berlin.de
`- GPG: 62FF 8A75 84E0 2956 9546 0006 7426 3B37 F5B5 F913
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