On Tue, Mar 7, 2023 at 5:32 PM Michael Paquier <michael@paquier.xyz> wrote:
> On Tue, Mar 07, 2023 at 03:44:46PM +1300, Thomas Munro wrote:
> > Oh, you already pushed a fix. But now I'm wondering if it's useful to
> > have old buggy compilers set to run with -Werror.
>
> Yes, as far as I can see when investigating the issue, this is an old
> bug of gcc when detecting where the initialization needs to be
> applied. And at the same time the fix is deadly simple, so the
> current statu-quo does not sound that bad to me. Note that lapwing is
> one of the only animals testing 32b builds, and it has saved from
> quite few bugs over the years.
Yeah, but I'm just wondering, why not run a current release on it[1]?
Debian is one of the few distributions still supporting 32 bit
kernels, and it's good to test rare things, but AFAIK the primary
reason we finish up with EOL'd OSes in the 'farm is because they have
been forgotten (the secondary reason is because they couldn't be
upgraded because the OS dropped the [micro]architecture). Unlike
vintage SPARC, actual users might plausibly be running a current
release on a 32 bit Intel system, I guess (maybe on a Quark
microcontroller?)?
BTW CI also tests 32 bit with -m32 on Debian, but with a 64 bit
kernel, which probably doesn't change much at the level we care about,
so maybe this doesn't matter much... just sharing an observation that
we're wasting time thinking about an OS release that gave up the ghost
in 2016, because it is running with -Werror. *shrug*
[1] https://wiki.debian.org/DebianReleases
