[lsb-discuss] LSB conference call minutes (Tuesday, January 30, 11am ET)

[Wichmann, Mats D]

>> I'd really rather not drop support for
>> an architecture until a major version, but we can't continue
>> supporting an architecture if we can't build the software 
>> deliverables.
>
>Hercules is a perfectly adequate emulator and will run "31"bit S/390
>Linux just fine (won't run a lot of IBM OS's and stuff for licensing
>reasons, but does run Linux rather nicely).

Hercules is probably a fine answer and deserves a careful
look, but the core problem was that support for S/390 by
current distros is eroding, so we may not have something
to load up.  SLES10 and RHEL5 don't produce such versions 
as far as we understand; Debian support is apparently
also waning (or so Jeff says).  We could load an older
distribution but in the past Marvin found that tricky
because the necessary versions of the gtk, qt and xml2 libraries
were not available that far back and he had to custom-build
those.  Not insurmountible problems, obviously.

Meanwhile, the 31-bit ABI continues to be supported on the
64-bit machines so we can't just wave and say "never mind,
we're not doing S/390 any longer", since LSB is all about
an ABI for applications to run on...

Probably the most sustainable answer is to build the
31-bit software on a 64-bit distro; this is supposed to
work but our builds are not currently set up to do this
kind of cross-building so it would take some tweaking,
and I wouldn't expect that to have any chance of being
ready in the next few days (weeks, whatever, given some
shortage of people to work on it at all)