Re: Speaking of 5.8.1.3-test ...

[Axel Beckert <abe@deuxchevaux.org>]

Hi,

On Tue, May 10, 2022 at 10:55:40AM -0700, Bart Schaefer wrote:
> On Tue, May 10, 2022 at 10:39 AM Axel Beckert <abe@deuxchevaux.org> wrote:
> >
> > 5.8.1.3-test failed on alpha again, but this time differently:
> 
> Looks like a zpty problem.  I'm not sure how much effort we want to
> put into that, because it's likely to be a problem only within the
> test suite.

And it only happens on rather exotic/vintage architecture which had
other arch-specific issues beforehand.

So yes, I fully agree. And I would even say that this can be ignored
for the upcoming release.

But even though I don't consider these issues being relevant for the
release, I also didn't want to sweep them under the carpet, so I
mentioned them.

> Axel, you may be the only person with sufficient access to alpha to do
> any deeper debugging.

Probably yes. :-)

[The remainder of this mail is just reminiscing about vintage hardware.]

And likely even more than you might expect: On the one hand, I have
access to Debian's porter boxes. (Can't share that access, of couse.)

But on the other hand I also do have an HP AlphaServer DS15(*) sitting
on my desk and catching dust. Haven't powered it up for a few years,
so I might need to apply quite some updates first. But I expect it to
run as it did when I had it with me on a vintage computing festival a
few years ago showing of old, exotic workstations running a current
Debian Unstable.

Anyway, that's kinda motivation to get that box dedusted and running
again. No promises on a time frame or if it will work at all, though.
:-)

Depending on how well-known a person is to me, I might even give out
(IPv6-only) SSH accounts on that box — once I've got it up and running
again. PGP-signed mails and a PGP-key, to which I can find a trust
chain, are necessary for that, though.

Footnotes:

(*) The DS15 has been built between 2003 and 2007 according to
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AlphaServer and seems to have been
    one of the models produced until HP phased out the Alpha
    architecture in favour of the also already dead Itanium/IA64
    architecture. It's actually quite performant for being "vintage
    hardware" due to its 1 GHz (single core) CPU and 4 GB of RAM. :-)

		Kind regards, Axel
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