[Pkg-samba-maint] Bug#563372: samba: Please add support for sparc64

[Aurelien Jarno]

On Sat, Jan 02, 2010 at 03:57:10PM -0800, Steve Langasek wrote:
> On Sat, Jan 02, 2010 at 12:42:04PM +0100, Aurelien Jarno wrote:
> > Package: samba
> > Version: 3.4.3-2
> > Severity: wishlist
> > Tags: patch
> > User: debian-sparc at lists.debian.org
> > Usertags: sparc64
> 
> > samba does not build on sparc64 due to a few missing conditional
> > dependencies on this architecture. This is fixed by the patch below. Can
> > you please include it in the next upload? Thanks in advance.
> 
> The architecture list is semi-automatically populated from type-handling,
> which doesn't know about sparc64.  Where does this arch come from?  Why is
> it beneficial to build samba for sparc64, instead of using the 32-bit
> binaries?
> 

sparc64 is a new architecture being bootstrapped following the 
discussions with the release team about the architectures status. 
Basically, here are the rationale behind such a port:
- Debian currently only supports 64-bit kernels.
- The current userland is 32-bit, but needs a SPARC V9 CPU, which 
  supports 64-bit instructions.
- 32-bit toolchain is not supported anymore upstream.
- The use of > 4GB per process is not that uncommon those days, especially
  in scientific computation applications.

There are almost the same rationales about an s390x port, some people 
are thinking about bootstrapping such a port.

If type-handling is used, as soon as support is added in dpkg 
(bug#560010), the new architecture will appear in type-handling, and
thus this bug can be fixed easily. There is nothing urgent in fixing it.

-- 
Aurelien Jarno	                        GPG: 1024D/F1BCDB73
aurelien at aurel32.net                 http://www.aurel32.net