The role of niche architectures and toy ports in Debian
In the last few days, people on the debian-devel mailing list have been debating again (and again, and again...) how much the ports and architectures used only by an handful of people should influence the direction of the project. With this post I want to briefly summarize my position.
The reason we support niche architectures and toy ports is that that some people are interested in doing the work, and that these do not hinder development of the architectures that people actually use.
When m68k started inconveniencing too much the real world development, the port was killed and the sky did not fall, notwithstanding the complaints of the few retrocomputing enthusiasts who still used and developed it.
I do not mind if some people like to play with kFreeBSD and Hurd as long as they do not inconvenience me too much, both as a user and as a developer.
While it is true that targeting multiple architectures helps finding bugs, after we have covered all the useful combinations of endianity, size of variables and char signedness the incremental benefits of adopting a new architecture just for its sake are minimal.
I am a Red Hat customer (also because of Debian shortcomings), I do not like it much and I do not want to be one forever: please do not kill my hopes.