Re: Removal of hppa support

[William ML Leslie]

On Sun, 26 Jan 2020 at 20:51, John Paul Adrian Glaubitz
<address@hidden> wrote:
>
> Hi!
>
> On 1/26/20 6:46 AM, William ML Leslie wrote:
> > On Sun, 26 Jan 2020, 8:20 am John Paul Adrian Glaubitz, <address@hidden 
> > <mailto:address@hidden>> wrote:
> >
> >     Hi Andy!
> >
> >     I noticed that you recently purged hppa support from guile [1].
> >
> >
> > This change does not remove hppa support from guile, only support for the 
> > jit.
>
> I'm aware of this. But unless the code was unmaintainable or broken, I don't 
> see
> a reason for removing it.
>

The only thing Wingo wrote publicly about this seems to be:

> I ported some of the existing GNU Lightning backends over to Lightening... I 
> deleted the backends for Itanium, HPPA, Alpha, and SPARC; they have no Debian 
> ports and there is no situation in which I can afford to do QA on them. [0]

I haven't pushed to see what conditions would need to change to make
JIT support on these architectures desirable for the core developers.
Thoughts, Andy? Ludo?

> Debian (and NetBSD) still support hppa perfectly fine so the code is actually
> being compiled, used and test-run. And guile has been building fine on 
> Debian/hppa.
>
> Access to hppa machines for testing and bug fixing is also available through 
> Debian.
>
> > As an ia64 user, i'm a bit sad that we lost jit too - but i don't run any
> > performance-sensitive guile jobs on that system.
>
> Are you using Debian's ia64 port? We recently resurrected it ;).
>

Yes I am - I saw that.  Thank you for all your hard work on it!

I was recently trying to figure out the issue with the vim-tiny tests
and I broke my ssh access: I failed to realise why setting up a chroot
was so important when you only have access to Sid.  It is quite a bit
of work to get iLO access in my office so I've been putting it off
until I have a couple of days clear to look into it, and I've been
working on replacing the ancient tech needed to speak to early iLO
cards (a java6 browser plugin and old SSL with no hostname
verification).

It's not my first debian-ports fun either - I ran a hurd-i386 box for
over a decade without issue.

[0] http://wingolog.org/archives/2019/05/24/lightening-run-time-code-generation

-- 
William Leslie

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