[tytso]

I hope Debian manages to keep sparc64 in Debian Ports. Just last night, I was fixed an alignment portability issue for e2fsprogs which only showed up on sparc64. The "non-portable" code worked just fine on all of the officially supported Debian architectures, and the only one where one of the alignment problem showed up was sparc64[1]. (Two of the alignment problems did show up when running a 32-bit arm chroot on a 64-bit arm kernel, but one of them, a failure in the regression test j_recovery_fast_commit, only be reproduced on sparc64.)

Sparc64 support is rocky; yes, it has a modern gcc, but stack unwinding in gdb is totally broken. (Not sure if that's a gdb or a gcc problem, but just try building some trivial program where main() calls some trivial function, and then try setting a breakpoint inside that function, and then try getting a stack trace.) This made finding the root cause of the alignment bug-induced crash much harder, but at least sparc64 served as a canary in the coal mine. Supporting niche architectures is great from a software quality perspective.

[1] https://buildd.debian.org/status/fetch.php?pkg=e2fsprogs&arc...