[cfarm-users] Installing emacs on GCC119/AIX

[Jeff Law]

On 10/11/2017 08:53 AM, Markus Trippelsdorf via cfarm-users wrote:
> On 2017.10.11 at 15:44 +0100, Jonathan Wakely via cfarm-users wrote:
>> On 11 October 2017 at 15:41, CM Graff via cfarm-users
>> <cfarm-users at lists.tetaneutral.net> wrote:
>>> You guys really over-reacted about this.
>>
>> Says the guy who waded into a thread about an OS he never uses,
>> complaining about thousands and thousands of dollars worth of gear
>> made available to anyone, no matter how dumb their attitude.
> 
> I think this is too harsh.
> He has a point after all. AIX is a dying and marginal OS just like
> Solaris. So having a very powerful machine in the farm, that sits idle
> most of the time because it has very few regular users, feels like a
> waste of resources.
Until you have a bug which only reproduces under AIX :-)  At which point
that resource is critical.

I largely agree with your thoughts on the long term viability of those
platforms and without resources in the compile farm, their support is
likely to bit rot at an accelerated pace.

I'm no expert on PPC virtualization.  But at some level inverting things
so that linux was the host (and available in the farm) with an aix guest
would make more sense in terms of hardware utilization.  But I don't
know how involved that would be.

In the mean time I'll continue to be happy that IBM donates hardware
into the farm and provides engineering resources to keep the GNU tools
running and supported the most recent processors.

jeff