Two-month patch ping: Re: powerpc*le-linux support

[Brooks Moses]

Ping?

(And adding libtool@, in hopes of getting a little more attention, as 
pings on libtool-patches@ seem to be going nowhere.)

On 06/05/2013 07:01 PM, Alan Modra wrote:
> This adds support for little-endian powerpc linux, and tidies the
> existing host match for powerpc.  config.sub won't return ppc*-*linux*
> so there isn't much point in matching that.
>
>         * m4/libtool.m4 (ld -m flags): Remove non-canonical ppc host match.
>         Support little-endian powerpc linux host.

(http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/libtool-patches/2013-06/msg00001.html)

It's been two and a half months since this patch was posted, without any 
review or response.

This lack of review is becoming a critical blocking problem.  There are 
a number of PowerPC little-endian support patches being posted for a 
large number of GNU and other free-software projects.  For example:

  GCC: http://gcc.gnu.org/ml/gcc-patches/2013-06/msg01018.html
  GDB: http://sourceware.org/ml/gdb-patches/2013-08/msg00574.html
  Binutils: http://sourceware.org/ml/binutils/2013-04/msg00264.html
  GLIBC: http://sourceware.org/ml/libc-alpha/2013-08/msg00096.html
  QEMU: http://lists.nongnu.org/archive/html/qemu-ppc/2013-08/msg00058.html
  Linux: 
https://lists.ozlabs.org/pipermail/linuxppc-dev/2013-August/109849.html
  Debian: http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=718945

In short, this is a substantial amount of work by many people.

Much of this work is BLOCKED waiting for this libtool patch.  In GCC, we 
cannot build shared libgcc and so forth because libtool doesn't 
recognize the architecture.  In GDB, the configuration patch is 
incomplete because it relies on this libtool patch.  And there are many 
other programs not mentioned above because all they need is the libtool 
update.

And, in all of those cases, we are effectively blocked because the 
project policy is to only pull libtool updates from canonical upstream 
(i.e., here) rather than patching them in a project-local way.

Can we please get this simple patch pushed?


I understand maintainers becoming busy and/or moving on to other things 
and being unable to keep up -- I've been there, too.  What can we do to 
help?

- Brooks