Bug#736752: speex: Please enable floating point for armhf

[Ron]

Hi Steve,

On Sun, Jan 26, 2014 at 09:36:28AM +0000, Steve Langasek wrote:
> 
> The speex package in Debian currently does a fixed point build, instead of
> a floating point build, on all architectures where $DEB_HOST_ARCH_CPU = arm.
> This includes armhf, which by definition supports hardware floating point.

Yes, and this was a conscious and considered decision, not an oversight
or accident.

> In Ubuntu, a patch has been applied to speex to enable floating point
> support on armhf, in response to <https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1125295>.
> 
> The patch is attached for your consideration.

I have had this request arrive in various forms a few times now, and so
far I've always knocked it back after a discussion that typically goes
something like this:

  > > Have you benchmarked this?  Can you share your tests and results
  > > that show what systems, if any, perform better and by how much?
  >
  > No, but ...


At which point I usually have to try hard to think of something polite
and constructive to say :)

So if you have some rigorous benchmarks, preferably over a broad range
of the hardware supported by that arch (since the quality of the FPUs
in them do vary quite significantly), and over a wide range of source
material using both the codec and the DSP extras, then I'm definitely
still quite interested in seeing those.

But without that, I can only go by the numbers we ran when we made this
decision, which didn't leave a lot of doubt about what the best thing
to do was going to be.

New information might be compelling in a way that "Ubuntu did this"
or "but hardware is magic" are not, lots of things have changed since
we did check this, but I'd want to see at the least how this affects
both the 'top end' and 'bottom end' of machines supported by armhf,
to get a sense of the damage/benefit spectrum we might be looking at.

  Cheers,
  Ron