http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/TomCallaway/SecondaryArchitectures

[Tom "spot" Callaway]

On Wed, 2007-07-11 at 21:41 -0500, Josh Boyer wrote:
> On Thu, 2007-07-12 at 00:58 +0100, David Woodhouse wrote:
> > On Wed, 2007-07-11 at 18:31 -0500, Tom "spot" Callaway wrote:
> > > You keep saying this, and I disagree whole-heartedly. My experience
> > > with sparc tells me this is absolutely not the case.
> > 
> > I posted the bug numbers to support my observations, and they supported
> > my qualitative recollection.
> > 
> > Perhaps it's just that PowerPC is in dramatically better shape than
> > SPARC, in general. Or maybe you've suffered a lot by being out of sync
> > with Fedora proper. I'd be interested to see your data and how you've
> > classified the bugs.
> 
> Personally, I don't think PowerPC and SPARC are the hard cases.  The
> hard ones will be architectures that glibc doesn't build for.  For more
> than one reason.
> 
> Still would be good to see Spot's SPARC data though, if he has some.

Don't have hard data. Just 6 years experience in kicking RHL and Fedora
into working for SPARC.

What I've learned:

Most open source apps build fine on SPARC. Those that do not are either:

- endian unclean
- missing sparc configure options
- miscompile on sparc64
- glibc/gcc/kernel/openssl (only broken on sparc)
- tools need to be made aware of sparc specifics
- irrelevant on sparc

I _never_ in 6 years uncovered a generic bug while working on sparc. The
"primary" arches in RHL and Fedora always covered those bases (even
before ppc was in the mix again).

~spot