Re: Plan needed for switching m68k to 32-bit alignment

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

On Fri, 2024-10-25 at 20:06 +1100, Finn Thain wrote:
> On Fri, 25 Oct 2024, John Paul Adrian Glaubitz wrote:
> 
> > the m68k port has reached the point where switching the default 
> > alignment from 16-bit to 32-bit is inevitable as the number of packages 
> > affected by alignment issues have become too large. It even includes 
> > Python 3.13 these days.
> > 
> 
> Are there any bug reports you could link to, in support of the "too large" 
> claim?

The following packages require 32-bit alignment:

- mold
- LLVM
- gccgo
- Qt5 (several packages affected)
- Qt6 (several packages affected)
- OpenJDK (all versions)
- Python >= 3.13
- Rust

Those are the most important projects from the tip of my head, but they are already
the biggest blockers. There is no chance that the upstream maintainers will adjust
their packages for 16-bit alignment, so these will be forever broken on m68k if we
don't switch.

I understand that this might be a painful transition, but I don't see any other way
to keep the m68k port alive in the foreseeable future unless we fix this problem
which keeps blocking the port.

You can see how the Debian m68k port has been falling behind because of the alignment
issues in these statistics: https://buildd.debian.org/stats/graph-ports-big.png

Adrian

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