[tlbuild] PPC builds

[Mojca Miklavec]

Hi,

On 31 March 2018 at 14:30, Schmitz Thomas A. wrote:
>> On 31. Mar 2018, at 14:16, Johannes Hielscher wrote:
>>
>> Wait. Revision 47196 deleted powerpc-linux.
>> Apparently, there hasn't been any activity for powerpc-linux this
>> year (Thomas Schmitz?).
>>
>> But as far as I can guess from Mojca's compiler messages, her
>> troubles were about powerpc-darwin.

Yes. Then again, I managed to compile for i386-darwin, yet
deliberately decided to drop those as well.
I'll have sufficient work getting x86_64-darwinlegacy working properly
on all supported architectures (at the moment it doesn't work at least
on 10.7).

>> Is this intentional? Are users of a (reasonably modern) Linux on PowerPC
>> hardware aware of this?
>
> I just had a mail conversation with Karl: my debian powerpc-linux can’t compile texlive anymore (gcc is too old). So unless somebody else steps in, powerpc-linux will have to be deleted from texlive. As for “users of a (reasonably modern) Linux on PowerPC hardware,” I have never seen such a mythical beast...

In order to compile TeX Live binaries one needs at least Debian 8,
while Debian 9 already dropped support for that architecture. It looks
like Gentoo still supports it (but honestly, I cannot imagine a Gentoo
user wanting third-party binaries, right? :)

I'm reading https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenPOWER_Foundation, but I
assume any of those users would probably want 64-bit binaries
(potentially little endian?), so these binaries would not help in any
way.

I also wonder if the number of of sparc-solaris users of our binaries
exceeds zero. Maybe we should implement some kind of big "red" warning
in the installer for some architectures, saying: "if you are still
using these binaries, please leave us feedback; if we don't get any
feedback, the binaries will be removed next year".

Mojca