Testing ports/patches on non-i386 (such as amd64)

[Mark Linimon]

On Sun, 20 Jun 2004, Chuck Swiger wrote:

[ list of useful software engineering suggestions ]

> In the meantime, you can make changes to the software in a fashion that
> are platform-independent [...]  None of this is rocket science.  There's
> a lot of sloppy code of there, though...

Yes, and a lot of it winds up in ports :-)  See pointyhat.freebsd.org
for how easily things break once you move off of gcc2.95 (which
tolerated many sins) and 32-bit platforms.

There's just a lot of programmers out there coding to the assumptions
that they have a very tolerant compiler on Linux on i386.  Those of
us that work on ports wind up having to clean up after them as each
one of these assumptions is broken.  (Remind your favorite Linux
zealot of this the next time they talk about the number of the
applications that they have available vs. FreeBSD ...)

> I guess I pressed one of my own buttons here.  :-)

No need to worry.  Other people share this particular button.

mcl