@benjojo my experience with trying to make old ppc packages says it might be the latter, but maybe there’s a particular flavour of computer toucher who isn’t me who really does enjoy it for some masochistic reasons

@benjojo that's true, at least what i remember was that the common issues seem to cluster in certain tools or libraries, and once that is dealt with there are paths forward. but i am also not the right flavour of computer toucher to have been doing that flavour of computer-touching, so maybe that's why 😅

@benjojo where does one get a nice s390x machine? Asking for a friend obviously

@benjojo Former: oh my god, I had no idea about this.
Latter: that obviously makes sense :PP

(I was half joking, I knew s390x since forever atleast, but getting to see one will never happen. yet.)

@benjojo @morc
and 3-phase power?

@benjojo Ask @hrw about that - he's to blame for a lot of aarch64 and now risc-v support; as far as I know he's ducked the s390x - but s390x under Linux isn't _that_ weird for normal code, it's big endian but otherwise fairly normal; even at the asm level it's very CISC but not that weird.

@penguin42 @benjojo

The main problem with s390x is big-endian.

Nowadays there are no other BE architecture in use. Debian may still build something other but that (BE arch other than s390x) lacks users.

Whenever you have failed build, check Fedora and Debian for patches. And/or use LLM if you are unable to find out on your own.

I find Claude being quite good in analysis of build failures. With good patches generated.

@penguin42 @benjojo

Also: s390x is mainframe, so many packages can be skipped.

You do not need desktop software. Or things to make usb devices working. Etc.

And s390x hardware specific software is usually buildable.

@penguin42 @benjojo

And more thing: I never avoided s390x.

My work on aarch64 several times fixed issues on other non-x86 architectures. S390x included.

Red Hat has people working on support for this architecture. So I do not have to.

@benjojo I used to work on a port of OpenLDAP to the old “Unix System Services,” there was an invisible translation layer that transcoded every incoming byte on a TCP socket from ASCII to EBCDIC and vice-versa, it was fun. Presumably that is a horror of the past now that they run real Linux.

@benjojo there is one more thing to remember...

S390x hardware is done in a very different way than other architectures.

So many software components may need some serious porting, while other may need simple patches or build config options.

Look at PCI for example.

@benjojo On the open source side that I work on, everyone I work with would say it's the best, but it's a self-selecting group. You don't last long in the porting teams unless you enjoy developing an expertise porting challenges, and care about open source software.

Bonus: IBM is paying them well to work full time on open source software, which is pretty great 😍

@benjojo I used to jhbuild GNOME on Solaris/SPARC back in the mid-noughties, because we got an E6000 for free; Linux Australia even kicked in some funding for faster CPUs. It was entertaining enough, but since it was voluntary if something was too hard it just didn't get done, which would be the main difference for doing it as a job.