[gNewSense-users] Re: Sparc port

[Yavor Doganov]

Chris Andrew wrote:
> 
> it would be difficult to make a Sparc (32 and/or 64 bit) port of
> gNS?

It would be difficult to make any port, especially ones that are
considered "exotic" either because no hardware is produced any more,
or because only brave people use it (GNU/Hurd and GNU/kFreeBSD).

Maintaing a port is not just a matter of compiling the packages.  The
people who step up to maintain a port should have a *lot* of patience,
profound knowledge about the architecture (and sub-architectures, if
any) and the toolchain.  "It is not maintained by Debian/Ubuntu"
should not be a stopper provided that there are enough people
interested in the arch to maintain it within gNewSense.  But a
prerequisite is a moving toolchain and live maintainers, which would
require much more...

The support of sparc in the Linux kernel is nearly equal to zero, so
this is the reason why Debian is considering dropping that arch.
Without a reasonably bug-free kernel, glibc, binutils, gcc, etc. it is
not possible to keep the port viable.  So if someone is interested in
using GNU/Linux on sparc she should consider becoming a kernel
maintainer.