Re: Question on BIGGEST_ALIGNMENT in GCC on NetBSD/m68k

[John Paul Adrian Glaubitz <glaubitz@physik.fu-berlin.de>]

Hi John,

On Fri, 2025-06-13 at 13:21 +0000, John Klos wrote:
> > You're not offering help. You, like Finn as well, are trying to block fixing
> > a long-standing problem of Linux/m68k without offering any sustainable alternatives
> > to fix this problem.
> 
> I didn't see anywhere that Eero was blocking or hinting at blocking. I 
> only saw Eero offering to collect data, which I think is a good idea.
> 
> It might not be directly relevant to the issue at hand, but we shouldn't 
> say no to more information that might inform these changes, either for 
> better or for worse.

I'm not saying that any criticism is wrong per se. I just want anyone in this
thread to understand that suggestions like bumping all SO versions or rolling
your own version of Debian is not helping the cause and Eero has made such
suggestions.

Some people seem to have the impression that I maintain the source code over all
the packages being built on Debian/m68k. I don't. I am building what's available
in Debian unstable and I want to be able to build as many of these packages without
having to patch them.

While patching packages is possible in general, most upstream and Debian maintainers
don't really want to deal with patches that enable the build on 2 bytes alignment
meaning that I have to keep building the affected packages in question manually
forever which I really don't want to.

Switching the default alignment will fix a plethora of broken packages and while it
may come with some regressions here and there, I am very confident it's the right
way to go.

The Gentoo developers are pursuing this path as well meaning that there won't be
any distributions with 2 bytes alignment left.

Adrian

-- 
 .''`.  John Paul Adrian Glaubitz
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