[Debian-ppc64-devel] Call For Help - Please support the ppc64 architecture

[Andreas Jochens]

Hello,

This is a call for help from the 'ppc64' porters. 

On 05-Mar-14 16:14, Martin Michlmayr wrote:
> Also, as with the amd64 port, there is disagreement about the name.
> While ppc64 would be nicer and in line with the LSB, our current
> PowerPC port is called powerpc and therefore it would make more sense
> to call the 64 bit port powerpc64.

There has been a decision of the Debian Technical Committee concerning 
the name of the amd64 port which basically says that the porting team 
should decide on the architecture name generally (see [1]).

The ppc64 porters decided to use the name 'ppc64' as the package 
name a few month ago. 

That decision was mainly based on the fact that the Linux Standard Base 
LSB 2.0 states that 'ppc64' is the correct package name for the 
architecture.

Other distributions like Fedora and Gentoo also use the name 'ppc64'.

The Linux kernel uses 'ppc64', while the GNU toolchain uses 'powerpc64'
with 'ppc64' as an alias.

In the meantime, an archive for the ppc64 port has been set up on 
alioth (see http://debian-ppc64.alioth.debian.org/READ_ME for details).
That archive uses the name 'ppc64' as the package name.

An autobuilder for ppc64 is running, which follows the Debian unstable
distribution. The autobuilder is self-hosting since January 2005, 
i.e. it runs the ppc64 port itself.

The ppc64 archive on alioth currently has more than 85% of the packages 
from the Debian unstable distribution compiled. That number is still
(slowly) rising. Every help will be appreciated, of course.

Please help the ppc64 port by including support for the ppc64 
architecture in 'dpkg' and other packages. 

Many thanks to all package maintainers who already applied patches to 
their packages to support the ppc64 architecture.

Regards
Andreas Jochens


[1] http://lists.debian.org/debian-ctte/2004/06/msg00115.html