Long discussion in the bug thread here. Seems the issues are: 1) not many volunteers willing to maintain the sparc port; 2) upstream kernel and gcc are getting buggier on sparc as it gets less and less testing, causing more work for Debian downstream, which the few volunteers can’t keep up with; 3) upstream gcc is deprecating the 32-bit sparc toolchain in favor of 64-bit, while the Debian sparc port has a 32-bit userland.
So the solution seems to be to drop the current sparc port, but leave open the door to adding a future sparc64 port, if enough volunteers emerge to get it in good working condition.
The view from my server room. We still run Solaris in our nightlies.
http://c0redump.org/i/2015/sparc.jpeg
I have a fondness for Solaris, though I found the hardware ran OpenBSD better. ::smiles::
Long discussion in the bug thread here. Seems the issues are: 1) not many volunteers willing to maintain the sparc port; 2) upstream kernel and gcc are getting buggier on sparc as it gets less and less testing, causing more work for Debian downstream, which the few volunteers can’t keep up with; 3) upstream gcc is deprecating the 32-bit sparc toolchain in favor of 64-bit, while the Debian sparc port has a 32-bit userland.
So the solution seems to be to drop the current sparc port, but leave open the door to adding a future sparc64 port, if enough volunteers emerge to get it in good working condition.
Anyone have any idea on gcc’s plans for sparc32 support?
You know an architecture is truly dead when Debian drops support for it…
And yet this is actually a port that only runs on sparc64 machines, of which new models are still being made.