On Mon, 28 Oct 2024, Thorsten Glaser wrote:
... You don’t understand the problem: applications are being written that require natural alignment for at least 32-bit and smaller quantities, some possibly for all quantities even. We need these applications to work, and we cannot redesign them (it’s common for them to store flags in the lowest pointer bits and do other awful things). Could you please, if you cannot believe it yourself, accept the word of those actually doing the porting that it is direly needed in the current Linux ecosystem. Thank you.
Do I misunderstand or disbelieve? Or have you forgotten what I wrote two days ago? You talk about "applications ... being written". Well, two days ago I mentioned several groups of applications: (1) core packages that accept alignment patches, (2) packages whose developers shouldn't worry about small systems anyway, and (3) packags I am concerned about i.e. the ones actually required by Debian/m68k users (which will presumably lead to disto bug reports, if they didn't already -- hence my question about bug reports which remains unanswered).
For Debian, we have superh and i386, out of these.
Is your concern merely for Debian's package archive stats? What interests me is portability and code reuse in general. That is the basis on which I would send alignment patches to upstream projects.
