[gNewSense-users] Re: Will gNewSense 3.0 be based on Debian instead of Ubuntu?

[Yavor Doganov]

davide89v wrote:
> Because Ubuntu run only in i386, Debian in 21 different
> architectures :)

I wonder how you got this idea.  First, Ubuntu runs on !i386 (although
only a subset of the archs supported by Debian are supported by
Ubuntu, and furthermore, even on i386 some Ubuntu packages clearly
have grave bugs and even do not compile).  Second, how do you count 21
architectures?

For Lenny, the official architectures were:

alpha, amd64, arm, armel, hppa, i386, ia64, mips, mipsel, powerpc,
s390, sparc

That's 12.

For Squeeze, they should be:

amd64, armel, hppa, i386, ia64, kfreebsd-amd64 [*], kfreebsd-i386 [*],
mips, mipsel, powerpc, s390, sparc

That's 12 too.

Counting the unofficial archs: alpha, avr32, hurd-i386, m68k, sh4, the
total number becomes 17.  Where this mysterious number 21 comes from?

And third, maintaining a distro is not merely recompiling a set of
packages.  There are RC bugs in gNS which are never fixed, due to lack
of manpower (most of them inherited from Ubuntu).  Switching to Debian
would at least fix this problem, needless to say that non-free stuff
cleanup is less in Debian compared to Ubuntu.

[*] These are not certain.