Why does sparc build for you? or, why are make check results reported when it hasn't bootstrapped since May 5?

[Jeff Sturm]

On Tue, 10 Jun 2003, Eric Botcazou wrote:
> I meant: SPARC/Solaris would bootstrap more often if people commiting
> destabilizing changes tested them on the platform. This is (almost) never the
> case.

Nice idea, difficult in practice.  I've tested patches on Solaris 8
that break on 7, or work with GNU as/ld but break on native tools, or vice
versa.  Then we still get bug reports for Solaris 2.6 or 2.5.1 users that
I can't reproduce on my machines.

For those and other reasons I find myself discouraged from testing on
SPARC even though I have easy access to hardware.  Getting regular
contributors to test on SPARC doesn't seem too realistic.

Such is probably the case for most non-GNU platforms.

Jeff