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Re: [PATCH] powerpc: New feature - HWCAP/HWCAP2 bits in the TCB


On Tue, 2015-06-30 at 13:49 -0400, David Edelsohn wrote:
> On Tue, 2015-06-30 at 18:01 +0200, Torvald Riegel wrote:
> 
> > I don't think we promise to do everything for everyone.  That does not
> > conflict with free software.
> 
> The request is not "do everything for everyone".  That is a strawman argument.

What I wrote was a reply to Steven saying that, essentially, the
technical concerns that Richard are an 'odd position for a community
that uses phrases like "Free as in Freedom" to describe what they do.'

I didn't bring up the free software angle here, and I think we should
get back to the technical discussion.  Which seems to include trade-offs
for what kind of use cases we want to support and how much technical
debt we're willing to take on for this.  What I was trying to point out
is that *if* we decide to not provide a feature because we don't see the
benefit justifying the technical debt, then this doesn't mean that what
we're doing is odd for free software.

> The issue is: should the GLIBC community and leaders use their
> position to pick favorites for architectures and ABIs.  If the GLIBC
> community wants to say that GLIBC features and architecture and
> framework will be designed for the most prevalent, commodity
> architecture and ABI (Intel x86-64) and all other architectures can
> live on the table scraps when the benevolent dictators magnanimously
> choose to throw them a bone, that's fine as long as it is explicit.

The technical concerns that Richard voiced are still there if we assume
that Intel systems don't exist at all.  Therefore, I don't see how he or
the glibc community are picking favorites here.  Could you point to some
more evidence that he or the glibc community (ie, backed with community
consensus, not opinions of individuals) are doing it?


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