cvs commit: src Makefile

[Robert Watson]

On Sun, 25 May 2008, John Birrell wrote:

>  Remove sun4v from the list of arches in 'make universe'. There has been
>  no active development on it for over a year now and it isn't
>  reliable under a simple buildworld. Developers can't be expected to
>  test code targeted for it.

Having an architecture in make universe isn't about making the code work, it's 
about encouraging the code to remain compilable even though most developers 
don't actually work with the architecture.  Sun4v is arguably our most 
edge-case architecture right now, but given that it shares a lot of code with 
sparc64 and sparc64 is run by a non-trivial number of people (more than arm?), 
keeping it compiling hasn't proven very difficult.  And recent universe 
breakage has often-as-not been in i386 and amd64, not sun4v.

Is there something in your recent work that prevents sun4v from compiling and 
hence justifies disabling it entirely, and hence guaranteeing it won't compile 
in the future because it falls off the "make it compile" radar?  If so, then a 
policy decision to drop sun4v support may be called for -- but this is 
something to discuss with the people who added support for the architecture, 
the release engineering team, etc, and not to make unilaterally.

Robert N M Watson
Computer Laboratory
University of Cambridge